Check your airflow. It could be that heat is building somewhere and being recycled into the intake.
Thermal Grizzly also makes a high performance pad (i.e. nothing wrong with using a properly-rated pad), so if you think yours is good, it’s probably airflow related.
Definitely will take time, though let’s not discount the fact that Linux came about before the internet was the internet. I don’t know if it will take 30 years, but certainly ten years or more doesn’t seem unreasonable.