Anecdotally I upgraded from an (overclocked) 2500K to a mere 3600 and am perfectly happy with the performance I'm getting, even running virtual machines or comp

Anecdotally I upgraded from an (overclocked) 2500K to a mere 3600 and am perfectly happy with the performance I'm getting, even running virtual machines or compiling large code bases. Would a 3700X have been even nicer? Probably, but when I bought my new CPU last year it was almost twice the price for two extra cores. So I do feel your temptation, but I don't think you would regret the 3700X.