I usually play with many of the modifiers turned up, so I have seen revolutions in games where I build large colonial empires. I tend to favour coastal/ overseas empires on old-world/new-world type maps, so this happens often. I also play with a fairly large human modifier since the AI don't handle revolts that well.
My empire, about 20 cities. 5 of those cities are on islands off my mainland, but still relatively near my capitol. Those five cities will constantly progress towards revolution without fail, causing me to have to drop my science slider for cash to constantly bribe them every 20 turns until I got the right combo of civics that'll pacify them.
I've actually been turning the colony modifier down and increasing the distance modifier substantially to avoid situations like this while still making it a challenge to maintain a large empire. If you really want you can also manually change modifiers by era if you want certain factors to be more or less pronounced at different points in history.
I like the revolutions feature, at least in theory. I like the simulation aspect of civ and revolutions allows for some fun things to happen. I've taken out rival civs by using espionage to up rev meters in a few of their cities, then capturing their capital. I've also faced the challenge of maintaining my over-expanded empire. It helps to mitigate some of the runaway effect from getting ahead.
My main complaint is that I almost always get barbarian revolts in my cities. Most recently, I played a game as Portugal and managed to build quite a few cities on other continents before getting astronomy, so they weren't connected to my capital. Even ended up with a couple religions founded in the periphery. It was a huge challenge, but it felt appropriate since I was so ahead that I was actually colonizing both the old and new world.
Eventually war broke out, but nothing but barbs spawned. Even the "release colonies" option only allowed for barbs. It would have been nice to see one or two new civs spawn, maybe centered on the new religions. Could have been fun to try to reconquer them, or to switch civs and build a new empire.
I think this problem was related to every civ already being in the game, but I'm not sure. If that's the case, the MegaCiv pack should help, but I haven't played much with it yet so I don't know. Otherwise, I have no idea. I like rev, but it definitely has a lot of holes, and from what I understand the code is a mess to work with.