You're probably forgetting about the price difference. Not many people are willing to shell out $10k for a single A9 that could be rendered useless instantly if devs decide to fork. Many people will still pick the Z9 because at $1.8k it is a more acceptable risk. It is not as efficient than the A9 but it is still better than buying a GPU rig. It seems like it's for more casual miners.

Besides, buying any of these outside of batch 1 is already a bad idea. Innosilicon is probably selling it now because they've mined enough to know profitability will soon tank.