The only thing I would say AMD got 'wrong' so to speak was the length of time it took to release. iirc AMD supposedly had the chip design ready for months before it was put into production. I suppose BF4 forced their hand a little. Better late then never I suppose.
This isn't how chip production makes, first of all it's rare to impossible to go from a tape out(chip is essentially ready for production) to release within 6 months, NO gpu's do this, 7970, Titan, nothing, that is how long it takes to make several batches, validate, make pcb's, test, assemble and ship.
It takes, or I should say a few years ago it would take 6 weeks from the time a silicon wafer into production to come out a finished wafer of chips. With each shrink this time is increasing as things like double patterning significantly increase the time in production and is one of the single biggest reasons for drastically increasing cost from one node to the next, with 10nm projected to cost 4x per wafer than 28nm.
The move to 450mm wafers(over current 300mm) is one way to combat that, time is still longer but basically bigger machines and bigger wafers doing increasing chips done in that longer period.
AMD released this chip when ready, nothing more, nothing less, they didn't have it ready and waited, there is no reason to do that at all.
The trouble is it can't handle those high temps and so throttles badly, which is why AMD have released two driver updates this week modifying the fan profile in an attempt to stabilize performance.
If AMD had released the 290 at launch with a "Titan cooler" for £350, these discussions would look very different and AMD wouldn't be able to churn them out fast enough. That is the missed opportunity.
No they wouldn't, because firstly it DOES NOT throttle badly, Tom's the only person to mention a problem had 10% less performance..

shocking, secondly it's a teething issue, they didn't increase the fan speed from press samples, the stabilised the production models to all have the same speed as PWM was giving less stable fan speeds, nothing more, nothing less.
The people who are making up this crap about it being much worse than Titan/780gtx, are trolls who are, I'll say it again, making it up. Titan throttles when it costs £800, fine, AMD's card throttles, not fine? Titan runs cooler, doesn't throttle and overclocks further with third party coolers, fine, AMD card does the same... terrible.
Even ignoring that it is literally harder to cool something with the same heat output(let alone more) when the source is smaller, it's doing no worse a job than Titan. The fan boys would post troll threads even if the card never throttled, cost £200, and was 50% faster, trolls be trolls, they'd just pick on something else, one person in a 1000 has their card turn up DOA... we'd have threads about how they all fail. We already have the "ridiculously noisy" posts based on a fan speed of 100% which NEVER happens at stock under any circumstances in gaming, doesn't stop fan boys bleating on about the 100% fan noise and posting videos comparing a THROTTLING Titan at stock to a 100% fan noise 290x and saying noise is insane.
Fan boys be fan boys, the quality of the product doesn't make any difference.