If you don't need it, you don't need it. Many people don't need high-end PCs, some do; it's all up to your use case.

They wouldn't really be called high-end if they were for "average" or "typical" applications and performance expectations.

Don't forget the application-specific aspects, though. You can have something that's high-end with respect to particular uses, rather than "high-end with respect to other general desktop devices."

In a nut shell going for a mid range build will deliver a great gaming experience and work well for most people. Sure top end PCs work better but you get diminishing returns on amount spent vs performance. A $2400 PC will out perform a $1200 PC but it won't be literally double the performance in gaming.

On the same time bottom end hardware is also a bad value normally for the cost may not show how bad they can perform. Look at the cost vs performance of a GTX 1050 ti vs a RX 580 these days. Spend $25 more about 16% more in cost and get 85% more performance.

Your current PC of a r7 1700 with a GTX 1070 is actually well matched and should play any current game well.

Im really surprised the celeron handles photoshop and general web surfing so well.

Again, I dont do any gaming and I got the gtx 1050 used for really cheap when GPUS were super expensive during the mining years (1/3 to 1/4 the price of a RX580 at the time).

The only thing I want to improve is the file saving time for PSD files. Is there any way to speed that up dramatically? I already have a SSD. The saving time is pretty comparable to my R7 1700 so I dont know if it is a CPU thing.

is a high end build really necessary??

No. But are human beings only concerned with "necessities"? No. Are individuals concerned with sticking to necessities? Sure.

Depends on your use case and values as a user. At work I use a 6 year old i7, integrated video, 8GB of RAM. It's fine. At home I use something quite a bit more current/powerful and that's how I like it.

All depends on what your doing with it. If your not stressing your smaller build, then don't sweat it.

Anything high end is never necessary. I also used to be similar to yourself in that I felt like I grew out of gaming, especially after my wife giving birth to our second son. With that second son, however, came a much bigger and unexpected tax return. I used that extra portion to build myself a high end system and suddenly, I'm really in the mood to play many of the games that I missed over the years.

That said, I probably could have spent half that money and been happy with a mid range system. If you want to save the money and are happy with what you have, more power to you.

I recently bought a dozen refurbished business class 11" 2n1 laptops to issue to temp employees this summer at work. These are from 2013 and are configured with an i5-3437U. 1.9-2.9GHZ 2C/4T Ivy Bridge CPU. In terms of CPU power, this isn't much to get excited about in 2019, but these have all been configured with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD's. The result, is these are very responsive/functional computers for general computing and web browsing. They run office apps, chrome, etc, all well enough. Sure there's more lag loading stuff similar to your experience, but it is functional. I found myself similarly surprised with just how little is required for a decent-enough computing experience.

Honestly, if I could have built a $500 used parts PC in 2016 and pocketed all the money I've put towards my PC ever since, I would have done that in a heartbeat. I like my PC but its VASTLY overkill for what I want out of it and I still regret spending as much as I did on it. I guess the silver lining in my current build is that its not changing anytime soon.