Yeah, $9K isn't bad for that kind of performance, but you hit the nail on the head. When you're wanting an 'all-rounder' servers start to suck. That's why I prefer to stick with something like a 1950x rather than go with a server with loads of 'slower' chips. Also, servers can be noisy and a power suck of course. The preferable setup is a snappy machine that can handle your working files and then offload them to a farm with enough cores to chew through the animation/images.
I'm glad that they moved us onto this workstation, but it still is running server CPU's basically. Its here for 5 years, so now its on to specing out new workstations at our desks. There I am going to go the direction you stated, fewer cores and higher speeds.
I have not had any luck with my first PC build at home, so far in teh 16 months I've had it, the MB has been RMA'd twice and now the SSD and the PSU have been RMA'd. I have a feeling that the PSU was bad from the start, but I didn't diagnose it that way until I got the MB back for the second time. The bad PSU might have taken out the SSD as well, I don't know and Gigabyte is utterly useless at trying to figure it out. I don't even know what they did to my board to revive it both times, so I have no data to use for troubleshooting.
I digress...
So, apparently Alienware (Dell) has been making Ryzen builds, so I'm looking into that. My IT dept is in bed with HP which does NOT do Ryzen builds, so I might need special permissions to go outside their regular supply chain. But I'll be looking for a machine local to load keyshot on and Cinema and run some real world tests with products. I have a friend that does large builds and supplies post houses, so I'm in contact with him to see if he can get a demo unit in for me. I was looking at teh Epyc stuff too, and don't see much that would make me jump to that. More cores=lower speed all over the board. I am finding that I need the higher CPU clocks to deal with viewport performance in Cinema for some of my larger scenes and simulations.
Good reading, thanks everyone!