Now, that is a surprise. The AIB will love it, but what made Nvidia change their minds? AIB backlash? But after 4 years of F's Editions why show AIB some love now?
I think people are reading too much into things.
Techpowerup as an example had multiple RTX 2080/ti AiB cards reviewed alongside the FE cards at launch -
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-duke/36.html
It was really only the GTX 1080/1070 that had a real delay for AiB cards and that was when the term FE was first introduced. Prior to that, and even still now, it was always just somewhat expected that initial cards were from either Nvidia or AMD with customs coming afterwards.
If anything the real concern at the moment is still supply chain disruption and potential further impacts from Covid19. While chip production itself is not an issue (other than demand possibly outpacing supply) there is still ongoing issues with respect to everything else that goes into making the end graphics card as well as shipping issues. As such you'd want to hedge by having partners going full bore ASAP to navigate the issues and beat any potential future disruptions (2nd wave). 2nd wave Covid disruptions would be a more devastating in terms of business impact then any competitor issue, the latter of which I've always felt enthusiasts tend to overstate the impact of (eg. how much sales are impacted because a product reviews somewhat better, enthusiasts tend to think it should result in a massive market and mindshare swing, but that is never the reality).
Not to mention without trade show commitments and etc. this year the logistics of any launch is going to be rather different.
As for everyone reading into the marketing, is this launch really all that different? Covid19 has disrupted the possibility of going with a more traditional launch event so I guess you'll see more of an online and social media approach to marketing (which in general over time has been gaining preferences over the more traditional tech media focused marketing). Pascal from what I remember had a similar cryptic (or even more) ARG campaign leading to it's launch. Or what about this hype Twitter post? -
Maxwell and Pascal had dedicated events that tech media was flown out to launch. Turing was launched with Gamescom and SIGGRAPH, with the latter being a stronger focus in which Nvidia was keynote due to the benefits of the ray tracing hardware for rendering/content creation workflow.
So somehow this online campaign, in large part due to circumstance, is really all that different?
In general I feel people read too much into past trends as well. There is really a sample size issue with respect to using the past to predict going forward. Both Nvidia and AMD change up a lot of how each launch goes, so people should not overly rely on past launches in terms of execution to predict what the next one looks like. Just looking at Nvidia they've done large branding changes for the past 2 launches already, who's to say the Ampere lineup gets named completely outside expectations as well?