The chief architects of the two companies who are making RISC-V cores seem to have a lot of experience if you are gone look up their resumes. Arguably more then people Qualcomm. Qualcomm bought Nuvia and are now trying to make money from that design, they never actually designed super high performance cores.

Addressing modes have never been mentioned as a limiting factor. Its not clear at all that addressing modes are a game changer for performance.

You can also argue that any other unique feature of ARM or x86 is the 'magical pile' that allows for much higher performance. The more reasonable assumption to me is that its simply about how much is invested to make it happen. I think based on its design, less investment into RISC-V will lead to a higher performance core compared to ARM because of that complexity.

Qualcomm motivation here seems pretty clear, and I don't believe its actually because they have pure technical merit at the heart of their desires.

So should I really believe the company that has clear financial motivation to push their line?