The 6600X seems less hypothetical than the 5600 at this point because companies love to make a killing ;-)
I have to agree that the 6600X having SMT4 and defeating, e.g. the 5800X in multithreaded scenarios by a decent margin warrants a probable $350 price, however as it's the case now, the 3700X is faster in pure MT workloads and costs less than the 5600X and comes with a significantly better cooler.
The 3700X MSRP is $329 (10% more than the 5600X), and in MT workloads loses in some tests to the 5600X, on average is ~ around 10% faster in MT workloads, and is worse at gaming and lightly-threaded workloads than the 5600X. I'd pick a different lodestar. The 5600X is cheaper and a better purchase for most users than the 3700X.
And speaking of an early adopter tax - it's OK with me as long as we are not talking about cash, especially lots of of cash Remember how people resented RTX 2000 NVIDIA cards and NVIDIA offered something not seen before - hardware raytracing acceleration. The Ryzen 5000 series on the other hand offers nothing new aside from a 19% performance uplift.
Time is money. And many of those examples involved a great deal of cash put forward for unknown/unproven items. With respect to the Zen3 chips you already know what you're getting. And $50 is not "lots of cash" especially in the case of the 5950X which offers 19% performance uplifts for 6.6% price increase.
As for GeForce 20 series, I didn't resent anything about it. It offered 20-30% more speed, and speed comes at a price, and price scales nonlinearly with speed (cf Ferrari vs Fiat). If you want someone who's going to complain about companies pricing their parts high in exchange for better performance, you won't find it with me.
As for AMD Ryzen 5000 series "offers nothing new aside from a 19% performance uplift", what are you expecting, a coffee maker? What do CPUs do besides perform calculations, and how else would you assess that value besides performance uplifts?
This would be funny if it weren't such a tragedy of common sense.