I'm saying the Series S should have been as powerful as a One X but with its modern feature set.
An analogy would be a 3DS, sure it had updated graphics features, but at the same time it was weaker than a PS2. It's how you got the borderline bad port of Xenoblade. The series S should be able to take any Series X game, reduce the resolution to 1080p, and run it identically to how the Series X has to. That extra grunt that the One X has with the Series S's updated architecture would be able to do this. Instead you have devs having to chop games down to run on it. What do you think is going to happen in a few years? Especially as the price of the Series X comes down?
While Microsoft can replace the Xbox One line still easily, you're still left with this weird Series S console that needs to be replaced in a few years since it won't be able to keep up with its big brother. Devs are going to have to be creating borderline last gen games just to keep them running on the series S.
It literally is. It lacks in GPU and RAM but has a vastly better CPU, and overall they roughly balance out.
Again that's basically what we're seeing. NBA 2K is a perfect example of series S doing exactly that.
I've been the first person to criticise the Series S, but you've clearly not seen its actual specs or something like that. Your "what they should have done" is pretty much describing the Series S.
The problem is that a lot of games aren't running 4K on PS5/XSX, they're running dynamic and way under 4K. So Series S equivalent version runs dynamic sub-1080p and sometimes has to sacrifice features for the resolution to stay high enough. That's always going to happen when devs are pushing the flagship consoles to their limits, when the X and PS5 are dropping to 1440p, the S was never going to have any hope of reaching 1080p. Its a tricky situation for devs, and it will lead to a lot of scale backs and treating S like an after-thought, simply turning features off to get it to work. That's what we expected, and the S would have to be much more powerful in terms of raw numbers than the One X to avoid this.
And you're right about the second half, in a few years the S will be redundant and everyone who bought it will be unhappy, but that's what you get for buying budget products I suppose. There's no easy fix with the S. Its a budget product, you get budget next gen performance with it. With some games it will run the full flagship version at 1080p 60, but these are probably not graphical showcases anyway, with many games it will really struggle and have features cut. But that's what S buyers are signing up for, and what xbox are doing their best to hide with borderline false-advertising.