I would not characterize it as FC getting his lunch eaten when FC sells out of everything he ever offers. Even with populist suggestions that his products are overpriced. Such remarks lead me to believe that people think FC is losing potential profits on products he has not yet produced, which could be said for pretty much anyone else in the marketplace.
Continuously selling out of everything you produce is a sign of success, not weakness.
Agree with you.
Having a reliable product line to continuously produce chips and boards is definitely the strength of AM, which is often be overlooked. One of the reasons AM choose 130nm in the beginning was that there were plenty of idle 130nm product lines in Shenzhen that time because exactly the technology is ancient, so AM could find one with very low price and did not need to compete with big players in EE world.
Now some startups are developing 22nm chips, which is the mainstream now. As a result, they have to try their best to secure the product lines. That means to compete with Intel, AMD, SamSung, .... Even if they win, the cost cannot be low for sure. In short, I believe they have the ability to design a chip, but how many they can produce and what is the cost is another thing.