And that's kind of my point. If most 6502s are needed as legacy drop-ins, then there's no reason to shrink the die if you're just going to weld it into a massive DIP package.
Yes, I agree with you; sorry if that wasn't clear - absolutely don't think they'd gain much from shrinking it further. Anyone who cares about shrinking it down further would probably gain even more by licensing the core and embedding it together with other functionality anyway.
