Agonist:

Dude, seen 5600XT, and Vega 56 locally for $175. Id even rather buy a $100 GTX 970 over this thing.

Undying:

120$ for rx580 8gb or 180$ for gtx1070. Each of their own but i would get an used card at this price point instead.

I so envy your used market ... Hell the used market here is more expensive that your new market too .

Why a 96 bit memory bus?

If this released during the mining craze, they would have charged $800 and it would have sold.

Agonist:

Because now way in hell would I buy this without needed features.

But... it has the needed features (EDIT: and even then, it's a bit of a stretch to say DX9 is a "need"). Maybe not natively, but what difference does it make how it achieves them when they're still accessible out-of-the-box? You're still going to be able to play these games with a negligible performance loss (if any at all) and Intel doesn't have to waste developer time on building the drivers. Sure, maybe if you're running Windows 7, you're SOL, but any new GPU you buy is probably not going to have proper/complete W7 support. There are good and valid reasons to not care about Arc/Alchemist, but sorry, this is not one of them. You're drawing a very arbitrary line in the sand here.