You can use Liberty for SV. But you'll never ever be as fast as with Tradition.
It's a snowball effect. You need to build aqueduct (100 hammers each), so you need to tech enginerring before Education (105 beakers for Construction and 175 for Engineering), so you miss 2 to 3 pop before Education (tech Engineering and building aqueducts), so you can't fits writer's guild and universities slots. So you reach Renaissance later and open Rationalism later. And because you didn't end Tradition, you're cities don't growth 15% faster.
So you're always late relative to tradition.
And your free academie with Liberty finisher can't fill in this gap.