[JohnJamesRambo]

Why do we keep using it?! It’s so unscientific that it embarrasses me that intelligent people even talk about it.

[wmf]

Fabs have been increasing transistor performance without shrinking the size much; for example, a 22 nm FinFET has similar performance to a 14 nm planar FET so feature sizes don't tell you as much as they used to. This led fabs to invent "effective" feature sizes to convey improvements in the process.

[worrycue]

It’s basically like a version number now I suppose.