Well I am far from pretending that all starts are peaceful CV-able and I have never had much an issue with people using war to achieve other VCs. However, there are many, many flaws in the current culture system (esp at higher difficulties) that I believe are bound to be improved over patches.
However, I have never been a fan of having an easy domination victory at hand at some point and then just stopping and calling it something else than domination victory.
Currently, the CV system puts, imho, far too much emphasis on wonders and gives way too few penalties to warmongering. Some Great Works should be destroyed upon plunder, the leftover ones should not be immediately transferable to other cities to get the output whilst the acquired city is in anarchy and realistically, the +3 culture per wonder resolution is very imbalanced given how the essence of CV evolves around hotels, airports, NVC and the internet.
I believe they need to add some culture per tile derived from aesthetics for a given improvement (maybe the goto TPs) or something similar, somehow allow a larger shift or emphasis into culture GPPs that is not all about faith. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to purchase GPs with faith but I think its wrong that your only alternative to faith after the Internet is spam next turn working 2 GM slots.
It could be a lesser version of the GMs that can be built with hammers, it could be an era or a SP/tenet that unlocks the possibility to build a musician guild in more cities or it could be that GMs can be saved and their strength adjusts over time as with other GPs...
But anyway, the issue is that the only real scalability of tourism output is via super-wide praying that there will be many, many dig sites within 3 tiles of our cities and, more reasonably, by wonder spamming and that is downright bad design. A 10 TPT landmark in your wide empire would've yielded 6 TPT from the equivalent GW in capital, not accounting for the pissible theming bonus possible, not accounting for a share of the culture value of a wonder you put it in, not accounting for that the base infrastructure required for CV is higher than that of other VCs and going wider is naturally detrimental for "per city production average HPT".
So anyway, long story short I agree that it sucks to have to only play godly starts for peaceful CV. I don't think its as bad as you need godly starts but you definitely need a least one very strong capital to be able to achieve wonders as well as the capacity to achieve tech parity somewhere in renaissance.
The wonder-based scalability of both culture and tourism is such that if the player can't get many wonders, he will be facing one or two crazy runaways that have spammed the said wonder and scaled.
In the mean time, I still stand by my statement that stopping a won domination to win by CV is not a CV. You could very well just beeline artillery after Pschools and take 2-3 neighbors to have 3-4 times the amount of GW that you could ever produce on your own and that will almost always win you before T300. Yet if you warmonger pre T100-120, the amount of great works stolen becomes so marginal that you net little to no gain towards your VC other than the odds of a few more landmarks.
In that sense, you can just skip aesthethics and exploration as well as archaeology which have CV written all over and still pull an arguably easier CV than effectively trying to attract tourists to your cities peacefully. This last statement makes no sense whatsoever to me.