I couldn't tell you how it was or wasn't "engineered", but Netburst (the Pentium 4 architecture that all revisions used) is often considered one of Intel's lowest points, if not the lowest point, if that tells you anything.
To understand what happened, the late 1990s/early 2000s were when frequency was growing perhaps faster than ever. Much of the advancement at that time was therefore just coming from "brute force" due to clock speeds going up (adding, and then localizing, cache was the other that happened in the mid-1990s). From what I understand, a shorter pipeline is harder to stabilize at higher frequencies (?), but regardless, Intel made a gamble here; they made the pipeline much longer compared to the Pentium III with the idea that the performance impacts would be offset if the frequency scaled up enough. This is why the initial Pentium 4 was quite a large frequency jump over what came before (especially if you ignore Taulatin which was uncommon) and Intel anticipated that Netburst might take things to 10 GHz. It didn't. On top of this, the later Prescott variant (which was different enough it could have been called Pentium 5) extended the pipeline even further. Therefore, clock for clock, Pentium 4 was sometimes a regression compared to Pentium III, and later Pentium 4s were perhaps a further regression.
I had a Pentium III as well as a few different Pentium 4s I used (with an Athlon 64 mixed in, but time with it was short) in those years.
Regardless, you're looking at Windows XP on CPUs that are much, much higher than what it needed, so the fact that it felt fast isn't a sign it was over-engineered. Service Pack 2 in particular did make Windows XP feel a bit more sluggish and need more memory, but any later Pentium 4 system probably would have absorbed that well.
I comfy clocked 3.3 and maxxed 3.6 (unstable).
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