The short answer: We are considering many things for evolving our format and trying to bring more value to our readers in everything we do or plan to do in the future. Right now, we have a predominantly gaming oriented format and I don't see that changing. However, never say never. We really don't know where this path will lead us.
However, the real answer to your query is a much longer topic. I can't speak for Brent, David or the others, but I'll comment on my areas specifically, that being motherboards and CPU's. The full answer may seem to jump around a bit, but some comments need additional context for clarity. I hope this answer is sufficient. (However, I do not promise, nor think you will like it.)
As it is, benchmarking done for something like a motherboard review is extremely time consuming. The focus is obviously primarily slanted towards gaming just like HardOCP's was. So while I think its important to include some benchmarks of that nature, (the nature being content creation and productivity) that will never be our focus. You also have to consider the reason why those applications and benchmarks for those applications you mentioned weren't used by HardOCP and aren't being used for motherboard reviews by other sites. Those reasons are: 1.) Cost of the software. 2.) The fact that reviewers don't necessarily know how to use some of those applications on any level what so ever.
If a pre-existing benchmark is available for those applications, then no real learning is required and that works fine. If pre-existing benchmarks for those applications aren't available, creating them becomes a bigger issue. Not only is it time consuming, but we may not have the prerequisite skills to do so for those applications. Adequate tests for some applications could take quite a while to run. Gooseberry can take an hour to run on some configurations. Cinebench's single thread test isn't exactly quick either. The time required to produce a single motherboard review can take anywhere from 20 to 30 hours to write once its all said and done. When I wrote our original motherboard review for this site, (which you will see very soon), I had to come up with the format, benchmark comparison systems etc. We don't own everything Kyle did, so we couldn't just move on with the same benchmarks we used before. I personally believed that we needed to update our benchmarks and do things a bit differently.
When choosing a benchmark, cost of the software comes into play. All the games had to be purchased as I don't think I owned a single one that I used for the testing. With productivity and synthetic benchmarks, they needed to be low cost if not no cost. Buying software is part of the game, but that's only something you want to do when there is a definite value add for doing so. Benchmarks used for a motherboard or CPU review need to be relatively quick when possible, but more importantly they need to be as automated and consistent as possible. Synthetic benchmarks are fantastic for this purpose as they fit the bill nicely, even though their meaning doesn't necessarily correlate to anything in the real world. Sandra Memory bandwidth is interesting, but many applications don't benefit from memory bandwidth, so its academic at best. It still has value as there are some tuning elements to the BIOS configuration, even if we are talking about automatic settings. So variance between one brand or one model and another can exist even though that's almost never the case. So that's why it gets tested.
In a motherboard review, we don't really care about the CPU. For CPU's, ideally you want the highest end chips because they are more demanding on the motherboard VRM's. They generate the most heat and use the most power. A Core i7 7740X is a poor test of an X299 motherboard because it only has 4c/8t, is limited to two memory channels and 16 PCIe lanes. It doesn't even fully enable the platform. A 9980XE on the other hand is worth using. It enables the platform and punishes the VRM's when overclocked. The point being that aside from stressing the motherboard, the CPU is irrelevant. Largely, whatever data you get out of a benchmark is irrelevant by itself. The motherboard does nothing to determine system performance. It's all about your CPU, RAM, graphics card and sometimes storage.
When it comes to motherboard reviews, it simply makes no sense to invest a bunch of time and money into deep benchmarking of content creation software for one simple reason: Motherboards all perform the same relative to other motherboards with the same chipset, CPU and RAM. The variance between one motherboard or another is within an acceptable margin for error. The primary reason why we run benchmarks in the first place is to stress the motherboard and its subsystems in various ways to determine how reliable the motherboard is expected to be and to see if any anomalies pop up during testing which would indicate driver or BIOS issues. The actual numbers you get are essentially meaningless unless you get a result on one extreme or the other which we've only seen a few times out of a couple of hundred reviews since AMD and Intel went to integrated memory controllers.
For CPU reviews, that's different and there will be some experimentation on format. Determining what benchmarks to use is definitely part of the decision making process. Obviously, we will always have a gaming slant, but HEDT systems are in a crossover realm and both productivity and gaming data is valuable for readers to make an informed decision about what to buy. CPU performance is something that needs to be evaluated and application testing is absolutely an essential part of that. But again, its a matter of procuring the software, whether or not existing benchmarks are available and whether or not we can learn the software in a short enough time to create a standardized test we can use out of it. For Adobe products, this is something we can potentially do as they are available to me. Some of the others you mentioned, not necessarily. I wouldn't have a clue what the hell to do with Visual Studio.
When you get down to it, we are all veteran reviewers of a review site that had a slant towards gaming as a niche in the review industry. We literally created this site to pick up where HardOCP left off and continue the work that we all did for years because we not only enjoyed doing it, but felt that there was a place for that specific type of content. There are other sites out there that get more into the content creation and prosumer side than we ever did at HardOCP.
