I see plenty of people claiming margin reductions etc without any substantiation whatsoever? Speculation at WCCF doesn't count as that, as much as fanboys will latch on to any such nonsense as justification.
12nm is not a 'more expensive node' vs 16nm - it's
close to being the same thing, and given the maturity it will be significantly cheaper now than 16nm was on launch. Yes, it will cost more per die to produce vs Pascal given its much larger size, but lets not pretend it's close to being sold at a loss or Nvidia are being in any way charitable. Pascal will currently have huge margins.
And I don't think it's anything other than childish to dismiss criticism as people 'hating on it', especially in response to people making outright false statements or nonsensical value comparisons. It's currently a poor value upgrade over Pascal, and it's only really an upgrade at all if you're going with the 2080Ti given the 2080 is ≈ 1080Ti performance (and more expensive), especially given Pascal seems to overclock more readily.
As I said originally, my main surprise is how meh it looks in reviews, I was expecting at least a few half-decent tech demos to sell the price increase to the more gullible of the beta-testers!
Any speculation about the ray tracing stuff is just that at this point in time - speculation. If you're happy to take a ticket for that, fill your boots. I suspect most will wait until they know what they're actually buying.