lol, good ethics?? I didn't know that AMD has any good ethics and good consideration. All I know if that AMD is not different from Intel, both are just out to make money. Let me cite you a few examples.
1. AMD forbids all manufacturers to enable PCIE 4.0 support on non- X570/B550 boards. In case you are wondering, actually all 300/400 series boards supports PCIE 4.0. This is because its provided via CPU, not chipset. All you need is to ensure the board is able to technically support (meets the design specs). This is solely a marketing decision because it will kill off their X570/B550 chipset. Look at how much more you have to pay for B550 compared to B450.
2. AMD initially allow their new 5000 series CPUs to work only on 500 series boards. But they later changed their mind due to pressure from manufacturers (to a certain extent consumers). One main issue cited by manufacturers was that they will be left with a huge amount of inventory thats basically obsolete. Again, a purely marketing decision (official reason given by AMD was extremely lame).
3. I really pity all B350/X370 users who are simply "abandoned" by AMD. They simply "did an Intel". Came out with "refreshed" chipsets and board. X370 and X470 are actually identical chipsets. Differences were BIOS and board design.
4. Both companies are simply here to make money and price their products accordingly. Simply look at the price of 5000 compared to 3000. Nothing wrong with selling higher price since it performs faster. Is this considered good ethics? Clearly no.
AMD is like Intel and Nvidia in the sense they are all profit seeking companies. Some of the decisions that you mentioned are made I believe partially due to profit reasons, and partially due to the design. For example, PCI-E 4.0 can be enabled on say X470, but AMD did not allow it in the end. The fact is that not all X470 boards are made equal since there is no standard to say you must make it PCI-E 4.0 compliant during that time. So If you buy a budget/ mid end board that unfortunately don't support it, the experience across is not consistent. So I can understand why they made the decision to kill the plan to allow PCI-E 4.0 on X470. I was using a X470 Taichi board then, and I was certainly disappointed, but I get the point. After all, I am already contented because the same chipset works for Ryzen 1 to 5 series. For Intel, because you buy a budget chipset like the B460, it just last for 1 generation of CPU, that's all. So not sure what more can you expect here. And PCI-E 4.0 is not really beneficial for everyone, i.e. there may be no tangible difference for some users beyond running some SSD benchmark to see a higher sequential read/write number.
As to the point on B350 and X370 users, just as you pointed out, the board designs are different. When Ryzen was first introduced, it was very different from the requirements from Ryzen 5000 series. B350 boards for example are not well built and so if someone was to slap a 5900X or 5950X and throttling like crazy, I don't see the point of force fitting it.
Price increase, it is indeed unfortunate for consumers. But if you were running a business, would you have done the same? The fact that many companies are approaching AMD for custom SOCs and not Nvidia or Intel, gives you a good idea on their opinion of the latter 2 firms.
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