There were criticisms back in the early days of the A3XX process that Airbus was being too conservative and needed to make the leap to blended-wing-body designs.
They declined, and instead decided to refine the tube-and-wings configuration offering a few % advantage over smaller competitors, rather than being bold and aiming for > 20% by moving out of the comfort zone.
Naturally, rival tube-and-wings are iterating refinements and closing the gap.
Lufthansa say the litres-per-passenger-kilometer advantage of the A380 vs 747-8 is 3%. That's a clean-sheet versus reheat of a 1960s design.
The A380 is impressive in scale, but has no other tricks up its sleeves. It's nearly dead.