It really is an absurd set of choices to me.

If people can't rely on your products working well for typical lengths of ownership from launch, even without the super strength, radioactive mammoth in the room of NVidia, its going to be a hard sell to sell your products.

I just refuse to believe development costs enough for this to be a rational decision for them.

Maybe they think people will see this, and then think nothing of it when they go to buy their next GPU? I mean to play devils advocate from their POV, many people don't look deeply into companies and just buy based on a quick look at benchmarks.

The thing is, many buy off of even less than that, and if their enthusiast friends are telling them that AMD is not a brand to trust with GPUs, then theres going to be a big reputation problem. A reputation problem they're already struggling with from years of being known for bad drivers, that they only recently shook.