Correct. But the last gen was skipped to thus the jump."many people" don't have any clue about anything related to semiconductors. If the die-shrunk Maxwell with that clock boost from the manufacturing process change didn't outperform it's previous self then we'd have a problem.
You seem to forget that the node change was from 28nm planar to 16nm FF. They skipped 22nm entirely and did a huge leap. We had numerous generations built at the same manufacturing process and that's why the improvement was minor from gen N to gen N+1. This time around each tier is expected to deliver 60% better performance in comparison to last gen simply by density, then you add architecture improvements on top of it (ok we can ignore this part with "pascal") and the higher clocks that is made possible and suddenly the performance increase of the 1080 in comparison to the 980 isn't really impressive. It's expected.