Instead of being engineers that weight every pro and con they went the marketing way aka BIGGEST/FASTEST ASIC CHIP EVER which caused them a lot of problem that could be avoided with a slower chip.
I don't remember exactly when it was off the top of my head, but wouldn't the HashFast chip have been really competitive if it went out immediately, even underclocked? HashFast could have been one of the original big 3.
If I remember correctly I think the chip could do a minimum of 0.8W/GH (I may be wrong). If it went out in Octomber (as it was promised) then yes they would have killed it. Even in December a 0.8W/Gh was very good.
But trying tons of board/substrate revisions just to get the maximum speed is utterly idiotic instead of delivering lower speed miners.