Where personal opinion comes in is things like a "better keyboard" or "better connectivity".. those are subjective.
An Air can connect to a charger, a USB 3 external drive, a mouse dongle and an SD card and either an external display
or a Thunderbolt 2 device at the same time.
The rMB has a single USB-C port that
doesn't support Thunderbolt at all - nor does it support USB 3.1 Gen 2 - so there's nothing you can run from it that you can't run
two of from the Macbook Air's USB-A ports (including USB-C external drives etc. which often even come with a USB-C to USB-A cable). To get anything like the connectivity of the Air you'll need a separate multiport hub - and with USB C (as opposed to Thunderbolt) that means your USB devices are sharing a port (I don't have an Air to check, but I'd assume that the two USB3 ports are both top-level ports).
Oh, yes - the Air can drive an external 4k@60Hz display
and a USB-3 device. The rMB can't - because the display uses all 4 high speed lanes of the USB-C port, only leaving a single USB
2 lane for any USB ports your display/hub might offer.
So sorry, no, there's nothing subjective about it - the Air has far better connectivity than the rMB. Now, if you get on to the new MBPs with 2 or more full-fat TB3 ports then maybe it
does get subjective (depending on whether you need the speed of TB3/USB 3.1g2 or just lots of USB2/3 ports) but the rMB's connectivity is just lousy.
The benchmarks you quoted basically show that they're in the same ballpark (but there's an i7 option for the Air that is still, just, cheaper than the rMB base). People aren't buying rMBs or Airs for jobs where a 1% reduction in render times saves hours and dollars so that difference is just noise.
Keyboard, yeah, they're subjective, but I don't recall anybody here singing the praises of the new "butterfly" keyboards. I'm actually using one in the form of a "Magic keyboard with numeric keypad" and the best that I can say is that it's OK - and that's taking into account the "pro" of having a wireless full-sized keyboard. For a lot of people, the last generation Apple "chiclet" keyboards were perfect and really, really didn't need improving. Just because you can learn to live with something, and it's not the deal-breaker predicted on launch day, doesn't mean that it is better. Both designs are low-profile "island" keyboards that
should appeal to the same people - its not like we're comparing the rMB with Das Keyboard or IBM Model M...