So I kind of sat the CPU to the side until I ordered a delidding kit.........and I forgot to do it.
When cleaning out my component closet I came across the 7700k again, and decided to reinstall it and see if I could figure out why it was running so hot. After installing it this time, I went line-by-line in my UEFI CPU area, and noticed the Taichi automatically overclocks the CPU by using "multicore enhancement". So basically instead of one core at 4.5 Ghz, and the rest at 4.4 GHz, it was making them all boost to the higher multiplier, and using extra voltage in the process. With this setting enabled, I was idling pretty much around 50c, load temps well into the mid 70s, and my Noctua cooler was really having to ramp up the RPMs (and noise) to keep up with the higher temps.
So I manually set it to Intel specs, and viola, the temps are only slightly warmer than my 6700k. Even when I played around by manually overclocking it a bit, the temps still stayed much better than the "multicore enhancement" junk (idle around 33c, load in the low-to-mid 60s). Honestly, the motherboard manufacturers should not do that a stock settings, and let users decide if they want to do it. So hopefully this will help someone else in the future with similar issues.
So in the end, I did a small overclock at 4.7 Ghz and left it in. Now I can throw the 6700k in my youngest son's PC, and sell his Kaby Lake i5 as he could use the extra threads now that he is really getting into game programming and such.