They want more scarcity so people who have been waiting will buy the 4090 instead of continuing to wait for the cheaper cards. The name change is just an excuse.

Decent chance they engineered the seemingly nonsensical product naming so they'd have this excuse. There was no good explanation for why they named things that way, but it makes sense if they wanted to keep this escape hatch open for themselves.

I can only imagine how pissed off their partners must be with these last-second changes, especially after they were already so hard to work with that they drove EVGA away.

I have never seen as many people I know looking to upgrade as I have this generation, and they were all waiting on the 4000s. Nearly all of them have only ever owned Nvidia cards. And now not a single one of them plans to buy Nvidia. They're all waiting for AMD. Crazy how badly Nvidia is tanking its reputation.