We are voting on whatever we want. I dislike the building in the game (thus never build it) because I don't like it in real life. That is still my feelings of it in game.
Your idea of the colossus is flawed, because it's not "just a big guy". It was an icon and considered brilliant. There is nothing like it.
The first seven are non-negotiable since they were in the list that defined the concept of a "Wonder of the World", even though the Colossus stood for little more than 50 years before it collapsed. It's bizarre that almost half of them were missing from Civ V prior to the DLC, but equally bizarre that the same three were also absent from Civ I.
Colossus is like a National Treasury that only works in the ocean, and National Treasury is easily the second worst NW anyway (after National Epic)
+8 gpt in the early game is never bad, and National Treasury (like National Epic) works with one of the few buildings you will always want in every city. As good as Heroic Epic is, I only ever want Barracks in one or two cities so I never end up building it. I'll often not build Circus Maximus until the Industrial Era because I have few happiness problems (and hence Colosseums) before then, and I generally get Ironworks rather later than is ideal.
Also, while it becomes obsolete with Dynamite, it goes obsolete when you research it and you can extend it's usefulness if you focus on the upper branches of the tech tree (and functioning Great Wall + Artillery would be insanely OP on the defense).
You can, but its effect is too minor to be worth losing or delaying the opportunity to upgrade all your old, promoted cannon to rocket artillery. The one recent situation I faced in which it would have been useful (as I was a couple of gold too short to buy an archer that would have saved me), the enemy rush came before I would have had time to build it, and I effectively got punished for making bad decisions - sending my two Warriors to attack a barbarian encampment half the map away to please CSes, and buying an archer in my second, expendable city when I saw Songhai forces gathering, rather than in the capital so that I could fight off the eventual attack and, if necessary, resettle the second city.
The arguments for the GW all assume that your terrain is otherwise flat, and that reducing enemy movement to 1 a turn is therefore invariably valuable. But for most of the time when it's useful, the only units with more than 2 movement a turn are mounted units that are no good against cities, and all those 2 movement units move at the same rate in hills or forest, or when crossing rivers, that they would if you had the Great Wall. The GW is far more situational in its effect than you're recognising; combine that with also being situational in the advantage it provides (based on whether you have troops in the area, whether you can use the time to heal/buy units etc.), and you have a Wonder that has very limited - or at least unreliable - application. It doesn't even keep barbarians out these days.
Not only is it bad, it's terribleness is doubled considering how far down the tech tree it is.
