In order to have an instruction set that a student can implement in a single semester class you need to make simplifications like having all instructions have two inputs and one output. That also makes the lives of researchers experimenting one processor design a lot simpler as well. But it does mean that some convenient instructions are off the table for getting to higher performance.
That's not the whole story, a simpler pipeline takes less engineering resources for teams going to a high performance design so they can spend more time optimizing.
RISC is generally a philosophy of simplification but you can take it further or less far. MIPS is almost as simplified as RISC-V but ARM and POWER are more moderate in their simplifications and seem to have no trouble going toe to toe with x86 in high performance arenas.
But remember there are many niches for processors out there besides running applications. Embedded, accelerators, etc. In the specific niche of application cores I'm a bit pessimistic about RISC-V but from a broader view I think it has a lot of potential and will probably come to dominate at least a few commercial niches as well as being a wonderful teaching and research tool.