Comment by mjevans

What's that military adage? Something along the lines of 'planned to win the (prior) war'?

There's also the needs of the moment. Wasn't the 8086 a 'drop in' replacement for the 8080, and also (offhand recollection) limited by the number of pins on some of it's package options? This was still an era when it was common for even multiple series of computers from a vendor to have incompatible architectures that required at the very least recompiling software if not whole new programs.