My understanding is that Intel's 14->10nm shrink was the most aggressive in the industry, promising to yield a greater increase in density than the geometry would imply, when usually there's a loss factor and the density increase isn't as good as you'd naively expect.

Even after 10nm was delayed by quite some time, Intel pointed to this and declared they weren't lagging the industry as the shrink was closer to a 1.5 node shrink.

If the 10nm delay was the result of this aggressiveness and Intel was well in to developing 7nm in a similar fashion before it became obvious how 10nm was going to turn out, this may not be a matter of skipping over a single bad apple.