they know computers have slowed down in terms of advancement considerably. They need to find a new ways to milk us.

Not necessarily. Think about those motherboard with only say, 32 PCI-e lanes. Doubling the bandwidth per lane is quite interesting for people wanting to run multi-GPU setups. Or just people with lots of PCI-e peripherals.

So far, I haven't encountered any non-GPU PCIe cards that specify which generation they're recommended to work with, though I don't have many to begin with.

I completely agree with the above statement. That can only mean one thing, though: more work for IT guys! 😀

Just imagine an 8x PCIe SSD that could saturate that bandwidth...I think that would come out to 16GB/s read/write speeds. If NAND flash drives can get that fast, that is. Might take one of those new NV memory technologies.