I think we need to see this whole RTX thing from Nvidia's perspective. What does the average/casual gamer want? Image Quality, they don't care didly about frame rate, all they want is that fancy cinematic experience. Unfortunately for all of us hardware enthusiasts/hardcore gamers, we are not exactly that large of a community vs the average consumer.
Nvidia is always going to target the largest consumer market first, hence Ray Tracing taking full priority.
I'm not saying I like this decision one bit, but Nvidia is a company and companies do what gives them the best $$$ for their work.
wish Nvidia would of launched Volta AND Turing, have Turing be the premium GPU for those consumers who want to get into Ray Tracing fast, then have Volta be the standard card that specifically replaces pascal.