This is not hard core min-maxing. It's actually extremely trivial min-maxing that almost anyone would have the capacity to do. Next time you're playing a quickspeed game and trying to improve your tech rate and you think to yourself, "hmm perhaps I should build a library in a few cities, or a university in my capital, to get my beaker flow up a bit", note to yourself that you are missing the obvious. The best way to get your beaker flow up is to start the very simple but annoyingly tedious scientist micromanagement. Like in my example earlier where Electronics was going to be researched in 3 turns, if you buffed a city to produce an extra 10 beakers, that has no impact whatsoever on your tech rate. Note I'm not saying it has negligible impact, I'm saying it has zero impact (because every one of those new beakers would merely get converted to waste). In fact it'd probably be harming you because of the opportunity cost of producing those extra 10 beakers. On the other hand, if you hired several scientists (13 in the example), not only do they have an impact, they have an enormous impact.
Boredom also exists in life. By your logic, we should model boredom too. Make the game so that every time you press 'end turn' you have to wait 10 minutes. We can justify it by saying "hey in real life good things come to those who wait. This game mechanic is meant to demonstrate the virtue of patience."
Technically you are right. Beaker waste doesn't make the game unplayable. But then again, pretty much everything else that goes into the patches isn't fixing things that made the game unplayable. Admittedly there are some bugfixes and crashfixes, but changes to diplo for example aren't making the game more playable, but they are arguably making it more enjoyable. Fixing beaker waste is exactly the same category except that it's even easier to fix.
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I understand that to some of you, beaker overflow is such a minor issue that you are perhaps only arguing at all because you want to show that other things are more important. I can sympathise with that position. However, please bear in mind that fixing beaker overflow is trivial and is hardly going to take away from precious time spent on fixing AI and diplomacy etc. After all, we don't go into the bug reports forum and post in every thread "this issue comes up once every thousand games so it's not important to fix". Take for example the bugged food basket, where since the recent patch it always shows as full. It's pretty annoying but not game breaking, and I would argue even less important to fix than beaker waste. At least the bugged food basket doesn't encourage people to micro; it just removes a convenience feature from the UI.
I'm ok with people arguing this should be fixed but isn't of critical importance, but I am absolutely stupefied by the people arguing this doesn't even need to be fixed.
And of course, if it wasn't clear already, I am arguing that beaker waste should be fixed in the next patch i.e. asap.
per turn and you have some unused scientist slots. Suppose you've just begun research on a tech that costs 2000
and perhaps a small amount less 
for a few turns, but you will instead waste (4*501-2000) = 4 
