I find that pretty obvious with AMD's consumer GPU development which for quite some time is no longer driven by the consumer market itself but by the demands of their two console customers.
I don't think that was AMD's intention, but it may have been what happened as a result of AMD's lack of resources and as you point out the necessity for them to find a way to pay for their R&D on the graphics front while they focused on developing Zen.
I think that they wanted to be bigger in the consumer market, but they made a few missteps in how to approach that and the crypto currency boom didn't do them a lot of favors either. I think that with NVidia devoting a lot of silicon to ray tracing and increasing their margins, AMD has a much better chance at taking back market share in the consumer space.
Supplying strategic partners with technology critical to their own products is not equivalent to supplying Zen2 based Ryzen3s instead of Zen1 Ryzen 3s to OEMs or Newegg.
But it's still all connected. The point is that it's not simply a matter of just pushing products into whatever market has the highest margins until they're saturated. That makes the most sense from the point of view of maximizing profits, but it's not that simple.
The rumors regarding the consoles suggest that the clock speeds for the CPU aren't that high, so it's entirely possible that the chiplets that go towards a console are a bin that wouldn't be too valuable for other markets.
You'll really struggle to find an example of where Intel or AMD have provided a premium product on more expensive silicon at a price that isn't superlinear to performance (relative to mainstream/low end products).
Probably because it never made sense to do something like that until now. Chips were monolithic so if you had a chip that could have 8-cores, you would want to try to sell as many of them as you could.
With Ryzen 3000, AMD can be faced with a situation where they have an 8-core chiplet that can clock extremely high which makes it valuable for gaming. Sure they could pair two such chiplets to make a beastly 16-core part, but TDP constraints will probably mean that two such chiplets can't reach the same sustained speeds at the same time.
They might also have some 6-core chiplets that don't clock very high or have garbage efficiency. They could put them together as a 12 core part that doesn't get very high clock speeds, but still might be useful to consumers who want more cores. It's conceivable that AMD could get about the same amount of money for both parts and that it's more profitable for them to sell those as a 12-core part than two 6-core parts since they would be bottom of the barrel R3s.
There's no guarantee that they do any of that, but it's a possibility. Switching away from a monolithic die changes things. Maybe we do just get the same thing as always because that's what the market is used to, but if AMD changed things up it would be because of the way they've changed their approach to CPU design.