@Fish Man
Yeah, that's a good analysis of the advantages of state property/caste system workshops. But it seems like you're talking about the scenario where you've conquered a ton of cities. That's probably the best strategy, but I'm going for a variant here, where I conquer few, if any, cities.
Still, a space win 75 turns after communism is very fast. Did you delay communism or something? How many cities did you have?
When I have just 6-10 cities that I settled early, developing towns is no problem. I don't even need emancipation for it really, so I can still use caste until the emancipation unhappiness gets too bad.
Getting hammers is definitely a problem with cottage cities. What I've been doing is running universal suffrage until I have sid's sushi/mining inc everywhere, then switching over to representation. And then gradually replacing them with workshops to make the spaceship parts. It's not ideal, but it's something. It's enough to get libraries/universities/observatories/laboratories everywhere, and I'm usually running a very high research rate. So it's pretty close to your "ideal" scenario, with 14 research from the towns vs 8 from workshops. Except it's 16 since I like financial leaders, and the towns have the flexibility to also build other stuff, while the workshops have to build research. The bigger problem is keeping up with health, especially if you build coal plants and industrial parks for extra production.
So yeah, hammers are a problem.. but I feel like the biggest pain point is just raw beakers, to research all those expensive late game techs that the AI won't trade me. There might be benefit to switching civics during golden ages, running caste/rep to max specialists, and otherwise using emancipation/US to grow and build. I think you're overrating bureaucracy a bit though. In the best case, If you have a fin/riverside town, it'll produce 7*1.5 = 10.5 under bureau, vs 9 under free speech. Not much better... except free speech also boosts all your other cities, with lower maintenance, and the cultural bonus is often useful too.