Does overclocking and massive cooling ever pay for itself?

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Anyone have any good overclocking situations that have made cheaper systems run as well as more expensive setups? 

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In my experience, this isn't the point. Once you get into the enthusiast side it's about pushing your components as far as you can. No one who spends a ton of money on custom water cooling is looking for a heavy ROI. Those components are about the experience and the customization of their build.

Now, you can buy a cheap all in one liquid cpu cooler and over clock the cpu for pretty substantial gains. Hell, you can buy a cheap hyper 212 for $30 and Overclock with it. It won't perform as good as a liquid setup, but it's definitely serviceable. If you can push an extra 5-10% gain for practically nothing, why wouldn't you do it? I know plenty of people who have spent hundreds of dollars to upgrade and experience similar gains(every Intel release cycle).

GPUs are ready to be overclocked from the time they leave the box, and they usually have plenty of headroom. There's literally no reason not to overclock your GPU.

Its free horsepower, because no one really even uses the stock cooler on unlocked chips, and if you are you've wasted the money and should have just bought a locked chip to begin with.

In the late 90s/2000s... absolutely.

Celeron 300-366 often overclocked to 450-550 MHz and ran faster than the much more expensive P3 chips due to full speed L2 cache.

Core 2 thru Nehalem series chips often yielded 50% overclocks and ran as fast as the $1000 Extreme Edition CPUs when overclocked.

2010s have yielded less benefit to overclocking (20-30%) but it still shows you can typically buy the lowest chip per tier and get close to the max performance out of it. Has to do with approaching the limits of silicon based process technology