Which was exactly why I disliked it.
No seriously though, I'm not a fan of the "consolidation prize" policy, where everybody get access to everything, no matter what path you choose. If you beeline military and production (bottom half), that should open some doors for you (namely conquest), but also mean that you forego other things (science and culture). If you want to do both, you'd need to do a balanced approach, which would probably also mean you wouldn't excel at either, which I think is good game design.
For the same reason, I hate how the fact that you get Pikemen at Civil Service allows you to get by perfectly well by skipping the entire militaristic half of the tech tree after Construction.