Chalking it up to “software incompetence” is a bit simplistic, to say the least. AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy not too long ago and their GPU division was struggling to even trend water. They didn’t have an alternative to CUDA because they couldn’t afford one and no one would use it anyway, OpenCL stagnated because most vendors didn’t want to implement functionality that only the biggest players wanted, and their graphics division had to pivot from optimizing for gaming (where they could sell) to optimizing for compute as well.
Now that AMD has the capital they are playing catch up to Nvidia. But it’s going to take time for their software to improve. Hiring at boat load of programmers all at once isn’t going to solve that.
It's been a while since AMD was on the brink of bankruptcy, they had enough time to do something about compute and yet it's still not usable, see the George Hotz rant. OpenCL stagnated because 2.0 added mandatory features that Nvidia didn't support so it never got adopted by the biggest player.
Now that AMD has the capital they are playing catch up to Nvidia. But it’s going to take time for their software to improve. Hiring at boat load of programmers all at once isn’t going to solve that.