Thank you for the detailed answer. I'll get to it as soon as my BTC wallet finishes syncing. 8% to go, but man, this shit takes forever, even with the dbcache=6144 set to 6GB. It's only doing 0.5% per hour.
I forgot to ask... what CPU do you have? and are you storing the Bitcoin Core data on an HDD or SDD and is it internal or external? 
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It's an aging Sandy Bridge I7, tried a number of things including loading my overclock BIOS profile. That didn't seem to make a difference.
8GB of RAM and the wallet sits in a slow 5400 rpm HDD for now. I think I should be fine if I'm diligent and don't let it go out of sync for months like I just did, but I'm guessing the hard drive is my bottleneck in this particular task.