That may be where it's helpful to read the whole in context. Specifically the 'gold was almost infinitely available depending on how big a hit you were prepared to take to your science' and the point about cottage spam.
I read the whole post, you were simply wrong that gold had no use in IV. Gold is used for lots of things, from research, to tech trading with the AI, to unit upgrades, and to pay for expansion.
Gold was never a limiting resource beyond the hit it caused to other areas (mainly science) you adjusted with the slider.
This is just nonsensical because gold wasn't really a "resource," it was one of the things you could convert
commerce into, and commerce certainly
was a "limiting resource."
The key point is that maintenance is a purely punitive mechanic that punishes something you have to do in order to play the game - you would take a hit to your science to expand, and you couldn't decide not to expand and still play effectively, whether you're using the slider immediately to compensate for the maintenance cost of growth or using it down the line to earn gold to offset money previously not collected due to maintenance.
I think we all realize that any mechanic which is designed to limit expansion is going to "punish something you have to do in order to play the game", that is how it works. The reason it doesn't "work" in V is because it makes non-expansion the optimal strategy. Now, maybe this has changed since the last time I played but I would routinely play games and by 1000AD have a dozen or more tiles between myself and the next AI because they for some reason didn't like expanding in spite of their happiness bonuses, while I couldn't expand because doing so would put me over the happiness edge. To me that is simply not fun.
Personally I vastly prefer maintenance to the happiness system in Civ V. The system in Civ IV allows for multiple different considerations when considering whether and where to expand; as I think
akka recently pointed out in Civ V the
only consideration is whether a potential city site has luxuries. I played V for about five years and can count on one hand the number of times I founded a city away from a luxury source.
Also, maintenance is for the most part a
continuously increasing penalty while happiness penalties suddenly kick in at certain times - much more jarring and less organic, imo.
Health was the same, and one of the worst-implemented mechanics in a Civ game (not only was it a purely punitive mechanic, it did a very bad job of punishing you since the way you kept healthy was by doing things - building granaries, keeping forests, removing jungles - you were going to do anyway because that's good play, reducing it to pure micromanagement with no purpose and of no strategic interest) for all that the idea of a health system is appealing enough that many players want it back (and a Civ V mod handled it quite well).
Like happiness in IV it did a bad job of punishing you because you could essentially ignore it entirely except in a few situations, eg poisoned water or when your capital couldn't grow anymore.
The way to control health and happiness in Civ IV is with the whip, itself a much more dynamic mechanic than anything in V.
While global happiness in Civ V is largely punitive, you can choose to play without excess expansion in order to limit its impact - this is the core difference.
This is a euphemism for "the optimal strategy was 4-city-tradition and nothing else could come close due to the way happiness worked."
Civ IV punitive mechanics weren't about trade-offs in any strategic sense (for all that they often entailed short-terms resource-for-resource trade-offs), they were just about punishing you for playing the game the way it was meant to be played and creating pointless repetitive busywork (yep, latest city's at 6 pop. Time to get whipping some slaves). Not expanding wasn't a viable option, not growing wasn't a viable option, you just had set thresholds at which these became problematic.
I guess one man's pointless repetitive busywork is another man's favorite part of the game.
The whip and the sliders- generally the convertibility of one resource into another, which increases as you discover more techs - is what I enjoy about Civ IV. It makes it seem like I'm running an empire while V feels like I'm just filling a bunch of bins, over and over, ad nauseum. The core problem is that science comes from population rather than commerce.
But *shrugs* it doesn't matter. It's all subjective, and it's fine that you enjoy V more than IV, but please stop pretending V has objectively "better" mechanics or design, because it doesn't.