You're absolutely right I think about the onus being on the devs, but there are limitations to that as well. In budget, the engine in use and the limitations of that engine, and coding talent as well. And wherever the devs fall short, we use hardware to compensate for it. Its always been that way and always will be that way. Software is almost never 'perfect'.
The bottom line for a vast majority of games in my view, doesn't really change: single thread is and will for the foreseeable future be the limiting factor when it comes to CPU performance. You're right about Ashes. And there are other examples of new games as well that use cores extremely well, I see them too. And at the same time, even in those cases the performance does not scale linearly with core counts. There are many more things in the entire pipeline that can limit FPS some of which even faster hardware cannot overcome. But it does still help in lots of scenarios.
Physics simulations are easy to divide across cores and threads, and any non-sequential workload in games as well. New APIs provide easier access to actually implementing code in that way, and this will in the longer term (we're not
really seeing it yet, today, let's be honest, almost every bench linked in this topic is proof of that, almost none of the results actually show a tangible FPS increase from core counts/thread counts) provide the headroom to make more complex games.
You keep harping on about a dead res and if you are not running into a performance bottleneck on your rig, more power to you. I'm not 'skipping' facts by the way, quite the opposite, I am supplying evidence that supports them and I will always keep asking questions when it comes to performance - all you've done is repeat yourself a couple times and link Google.com. And yes, there are a lot more multi-threaded programs but if you had taken the time to actually get into the supported evidence of single thread limited gaming scenario's, you would see most cores are loaded with nothing substantial, at least nothing that improves FPS. We're at 15 pages now... do scroll through them and take a look. The comment about FX and 2012... you do realize I just upgraded from Ivy Bridge, yes? I was around back then, just not here... I suppose I shouldn't tell you how old I am but you're quite far off the mark with 'kid'
Beyond that, lets agree to disagree, because this is going nowhere substantial, except for getting personal.