Yes I agree - same for me for most things (and for me the ultra would be much more than I need). But I love the idea that power wise I am future proofing my needs for now with the MAX Chip.
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Well, the bonus came through and my Studio is on the way. Max, 62 GB ram, 1 TB SSD.
Woo hoo!
As my wife is a teacher I got a little off with the education discount. 
But, as I noted in another thread, it is apparently on the proverbial slow boat from China as it won’t arrive until some time in June.
And as I noted in that other thread, I am happy and sad at the same time.
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I’m wondering how to fire up enough threads to use even a small subset of the cores. I reckon there’ll be one heck of a skew in terms of core utilisation. But at least the hungriest thread will probably have a core to itself.
(Talking as a mainframe performance guy who co-wrote a presentation called “Engine-ering” about much the same topic. One mainframe machine today tops out at 190 engines/cores plus tons of processors you mostly don’t count the same way.)
I got an academic discount on mine - because of my wife. I think the discount might have dropped from 15% to 10% recently; We were a little disappointed.
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I think I am done with all mac desktops. I bought a 2020 iMac 5K and it was great during the pandemic but now I don’t want to be sitting at my desk at home.
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But keep in mind the ultra upgrade includes not just the double chip processor, but also includes double the memory (32-64) and double the storage space (512-1TB).
If you upgrade the base max studio to more memory and more storage capacity, it adds another $600 so the difference for 2x the power is $1,400, not $2,000.
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Went with Max.
In my case, the programs that require hardware performance are Lightroom and Photoshop. My existing iMac 2017 model with intel I7 is already quite tolerable but I couldn’t resist the siren song of new hardware.
Also current iMac has 40 GB ram and that has been quite adequate so getting 32 GB on Mac Studio should be quite sufficient
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Your computer is nearly the same as mine (2017 27 inch 5K i7, 2TB, 32GB RAM), with the same use requirements (Photo processing would be the most demanding tasks). Like you, I was thinking a Max would be the right fit for all that I do (WFH document processing, conference video calls, and email mostly along with my photo hobby).
Would you get one screen or two? I’m thinking of getting two…
One screen works for me and my pocketbook. 
I’ve really rationalized this as my iMac is working adequately, I’m anticipating that the Mac Studio with the Studio Display will be a very enjoyable extravagance
I think that the rise of segments like small-shop video content creators (YouTube) and mobile app developers has effectively created a middle tier, which I won’t call prosumer, because it’s not really that. Apple’s whole Mac product line is beginning to reflect that, tough it’s still a touch messy on the “low” end of the notebooks.
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I think the creative professional — a field Apple at first nurtured, then re-created in the aughts — has replaced the “prosumer” part of their computer brackets.
It was never as simple as the four-quadrant bracket Steve liked to present, because production houses muddy it up. A low-end Mac Pro in 2010 was very different from the same product with much higher specs.
Now the Studio sits between an iMac or Mac mini and a Mac Pro. But unless you were in a production house of some sort, you probably wouldn’t buy today’s Mac Pro. The Mac Studio is just a replacement for the $3k-$8k computer that Apple used to offer in the same body as a Mac Pro.
So now it’s three tiers of computers: Normal Person machines, Professional Creative Work machines, and Disney-tier machines.
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