You are comparing with a 5,1. The post I replied to didn't mention that. Even then you're comparing a 10 year old, (now $1000), computer with a brand new one that is many times the cost. Objectively not exactly Apples to Apples.
A Mac isn't the only way to accomplish a job remember.
A bind also comes in many forms, financial being a good one of those.
The problem is that a 5,1 to a 7,1 - one is well used, while there aren't 7,1 used available it seems to me. What does that tell me? Either that Apple haven't sold many, or that they are doing the job. You can pass a bit of the hardware across too - like RAID drive cards & monitors. In real terms (time value of money), the 7,1 is cheaper than the 5,1 was ... but performance wise, a 7,1 is not as good value as it was, due to the proximity of things like a 10 core i9 iMac which is one third of somewhat similar spec 7,1 price. But a 7,1 will last over decade though - an iMac won't even if it spends half as much time trying. And doing it all somewhat slower at that.
IMO the way for heavy users to evaluate cost / performance, is to divide the expected useful life of the machine up ... or work out a rent model for the machine. Come to think of it ... imagine if we got our wive's to buy a work computer, and then we rented it from them ... they might like that, and we'd have a better way of comparing cost versus performance and bottleneck and downtime costs as well when making choices.
Hopefully apple will intro a cheaper expandable desktop ... doing so might keep some from jumping ship into the other world where tower prices are much cheaper, but less certain too.
