I hate recommending people spend more money, but in this case... :c
For me personally, upgrading to X99 was the best choice I ever made for building a gaming VM. In my case I kinda need performance enough for both systems since I'm a little more oriented towards productivity, so 'dem cores' really do matter depending on what exactly you wanna do. The 5820k oughtta be reasonable enough to keep the system running relatively quickly. ie, if you want a (relatively) painless experience, you may wanna save up a little more cash just to make absolutely certain.
Adding a second GPU (doesn't have to be the same manufacturer. They don't even have to be both Nvidia or AMD) also helps, since...if you're using the CPU's integrated graphics, that'll hold back your processor a little more than if the host and VM each had their own discrete card.
Back when I was running a gaming VM off my i7-4770, daily use was painful. It was like having two systems with a measly i3 each, (if I assigned another core to one machine, it rendered the other nigh-useless for my purposes) and with that said, this might be one of those rare cases where....and I really hate this word....you may be bottlenecking that 980. Especially if you're running games like BF4, as you mentioned. On top of that, you said you wanna be able to edit videos and manage servers, which makes "as-many-cores-as-possible" an absolute necessity to not cheap out. (oh, and if you're editing videos, you might also wanna consider more memory.)
Side note: VGA passthrough does work with ESXI; Puget systems got it running. If it "doesn't work" (correction: didn't work for you) there was something wrong with your config.
Regarding your security concerns....
I'm not an Archer, so I can't speak for the current state of the developers or community, but last time I checked, the developers gave exactly zero fucks about security, taking several years to even introduce key signatures into package management, and all sorts of weird stuff like that, so I'm not entirely confident about using Arch as a daily driver. (Some people have recommended 'Hardened' Gentoo, Slackware, and I've personally had a pretty good experience with Debian.)
It's also not the most stable distro around, so I can't really speak for consistency of software support, either. You won't really "break" your installation as long as you're cautious, but there are the occasional "oops" moments where suddenly you can't edit videos because Lightworks/Cinelerra/etc won't work after an update, etc etc.
With that said, there is no shame in using Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, or other "non-elite" distributions. The only type of person to whom I'd recommend something like Arch would be hardcore tinkerers, and no one else.
Hope this helps, and good luck.
