Yes, sorry about the slightly misleading thread name, this was done on purpose so we could have some meaningful discussion. As such, I wont be doing a point by point rebutal of points made because it's simply aggressive behaviour and a waste of time. Same thing with tl;dr posts.
I know that gold in civ4 paid for cities and units but that was entirely passive. The only reason you tried to increase commerce was so you could notch the slider up another tick. The only purpose of commerce was to allow you to pay for maintenance costs and run the slider as high as possible. That was it - no thought required. The espionage and culture sliders were, at worst, a joke and, at best, a quick way to get rid of war weariness.
Someone above mentioned that bigger empire equalled more science and more gold. I think that is entirely untrue in Civ5, although it was true in Civ4. The new way in which national wonders are managed and the much higher cost in building wealth/science buildings means that it is very hard to simultaneously build your empire AND your infrastructure. I've just finished a game as Gandhi as emperor and only ever had 4 cities and no puppets and managed a far higher rate of science than I'm doing now as the Romans running a domination policy.
The idea that diplomacy has been dumbed down is one that I abhor. Resource trading is far more important now than before, mostly because the AI might actually give you some strategic resource, and because having lots of them is more important. You can be friends with other civs (and doing so is very important for research agreements) but doing so now actually requires hard work and forward planing - not just converting religion or giving them millions of freebies and doing as they tell you all the time. Making diplomacy symmetric between the player and the AI is a great thing that few games have managed (EU3 failed utterly in my opinion at this - even though it is a great game).
Perhaps I have been wrong about corporations, the problem is I got grossly bored of any given Civ4 game by the time I reached that level. This may due to balancing issues which lead the early game and starting position to be too influential - I don't know. But I still found them not only lacking in originality but rather annoying because the real maintenance cost was not the maintenance cost shown by the UI due to the incredibly annoying and opaque inflation mechanism. In anyway, this is grossly off topic - I think that the inclusion of many, very specific late game buildings as well as city states sort of full fills the roles of corporations quite well - which is to use gold to get science/production/food/resources. But maybe I'm just wrong and never used corporations properly in Civ4. Anyway, the removal of them can be argued to be an example of dumbing down (more succesfully than in other cases anyway).
I've never gotten round to playing rise of mankind, but might do so now considering the glowing reviews this thread has given it.