For sure! My best guess is at the time people were still getting used to octo-core consumer CPUs. Nowadays it doesn’t seem to make as much sense to have a 16-core workstation Zen 2 part when the prosumer part is pretty fast. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 16-core TR 3 was eventually released though if they happen to have a lot of dies with partially working chiplets. The main benefit of TR anyway is the increased downstream connectivity, so a lower core part that retains the same connectivity would be great for those who don’t need the raw CPU resources but need the connectivity.
For those who need high connectivity, but do not need the high CPU performance of a Threadripper, AMD already has the right products, i.e. Epyc 7302P or the other cheaper Epyc models. While Epyc MBs with PCIe 4.0 are not easy to find yet, if PCIe 3.0 is OK then Supermicro H11SSL is widely available.
These new Threadripper models are useful only for those who want high performance per dollar and high performance per computer case.
A 3970X has at $2000 a performance not much less than an Epyc 7702P @ $4400 or a Xeon 8280 @ $10000, so its performance per dollar is excellent.
As a rule, this is the advantage of the "workstation" CPUs, which offer a high performance per dollar, because they have high clock frequencies allowing them to match the performance of "server" CPUs with much more cores and with a much higher price.
The "server" CPUs have the advantage of much better performance per watt and also of a longer lifetime when operated 24/7. So, for continuous operation at high load it makes sense to spend more for a "server" processor and then have less operating expenses, but for only sporadic high loads it is better to buy cheaper "workstation" CPUs, i.e. Threadripper or Xeon W.
The problem with the new Threadripper models is that they are expensive enough so that for many applications it is cheaper to obtain the same performance with multiple Ryzen 9.
The price for Epyc do not rise so much for high cores, so after you add the cost of the MB, of the PSU and of the case, the higher-core models have a better performance than the models with fewer cores. This means that one computer with a 64-core Epyc is cheaper than 2 computers with 32-core Epyc CPUs. So for Epyc it makes sense to buy the most expensive models required to reach your target of performance.
On the other hand one computer with a 3970X is more expensive than 2 computers with 3950X (true even after taking into account the slightly higher all-core frequency of 3970X). Also, one computer with 3960X is more expensive than 2 computers with 3900X.
Therefore, if one has applications that do not need superfast communication between the parallel processes, e.g. the very common task of program compilation, then it is better to buy several computers with Ryzen 9 3950X or 3900X, instead of buying computers with Threadripper.
So at these prices, I expect that AMD will sell less Threadrippers than before, because in many cases there are better AMD products, e.g. 3950X for high performance per dollar and 7302P for high connectivity per dollar.