I think people would value Angkor Wat more if they played more with Liberty and less with Tradition. The tile acquiring bonus from Tradition is huge, and when I play Liberty, I frequently find myself spending a lot of gold on buying tiles, so actually I think Angkor Wat can be pretty useful. But then again, I play with a mod that both adds extra bonus to Angkor Wat (free Pagoda in city) as well as makes Liberty and wide gameplay in general more viable, so I fully understand why people don't use it much in normal game. I also use WHoward's mod that decouples great engineers, scientists and merchants, which makes GE (and GM) points much more worthwhile.
I almost always play liberty, but first I open tradition in a way I think of that as part of liberty as it's important to get your cities expanding early. But by Angor Wat hopefully you'll have gold to buy what you need anyway and if you don't there are probably things you should be doing to get your gpt up rather than building Angor Wat, AW gives you a specific discount, gpt lets you buy lots of things you may need not just land.
Mods are another story you could make any great wonder worthwhile with the right mod.