My understanding is that RISC-V needs both economies of scale AND chips that are manufactured at the bleeding edge fabs (smallest dies, etc) which is a lot more expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem as there's not (yet?) demand. The architectural limitations will remain until there's incentive to work on it.

In many ways it's not much different than Linux was in the 1990s. It was cheap and useful, but often not as performant as commercial OSes (UNIX or even windows) until big corporate money came in and started piling resources into it. Distribution fragmentation was also an issue, which could still cause headaches for RISC-V (especially if some companies start adding proprietary performance extensions that others can't). So I think it remains to be seen how RISC-V will pan out (eg will the cloud vendors see enough of an ROI supporting it for higher end computing than buying ARM licences).