I have also seen some high level players settle great scientist. With the mids you get 9 base beakers which becomes near 30 beakers when you add in library, oxford, university and academy amongst others. While settling may not look good mathematically speaking given that even 30 beakers per turn still take 67 turns to give more than the 2k or so a bulb gives it do come with a few nice advantages:
- You get to choose exactly where your beakers go unlike bulb and in the long run you earn more beakers than a bulb
- No reliance on commerce, slider setting and terrain unlike an academy also a settled great scientist provide one hammer
There is also the question when to start running specialists. If done early they tend to slow down more important stuff such as city growth and expansions but if done late you lose out on beakers and such. Probably the best time would be around the time you have gotten down a number of cities and really have no more important city sites left and no need to rush somebody.
Optimally timing for heavy specialist useage I think if you plan to bulb would be around the time you get music (assuming you get it first) and have access to pacifism and caste system as you can run golden age pacifism combination to farm out several great scientists for a low cost and these can then be used to bulb for full beakers.
For mid-rep the goal is pretty much to use your scientist to generate science so you will likely gain alot from runing specialist pretty much as soon as you get mids, the risk is still that you slow down your game if you use specialists too early as they unlike cottages can not feed themself, on the other hand dealying specialists will cost you beakers.
I think mid-rep favor smaller cities a bit more than you normally would. A city by itself give 2 food which is enough to run a specialist by itself and you lack access to monarchy so growing large cities are not as cheap. With mercantilism you can get another scientist per city. Every other specialist would need the food 2 grassland farmers or one foodplain farmer can provide so your population get quickly inflated with farmers who do little other than supporting specialists. Food resources do help alot but not all cities have the luxury of having them.
I mean a pop 1 city could potentially have 2 scientist with mercantilism and using the city food. To get 2 more you need to grow somewhere between population 5-7 (2-4 farmers, 3 specialists + 1 free with mercantilism) and to get 2 more specialist the city need somewhere around 9-13 population and it continues like that but given you likely use your best food tiles first, the needed population just keep increasing for less gain.
With 12 beakers from the 2 "free" specialists, you need to build alot of cities before maintenance start to drag you down more than these cities contribute. The great lighthouse that is said to help rapid expansion don't even come close to 12 beakers in most cases. You can also run 2 merchants for 6 beakers 6 gold if you want to keep the slider at 100%.
) and you are planning to win space. Anyway, imo an academy is good because of bureaucracy. I think even that 1st academy might not be quite as good as common knowledge assumes (compared to bulbing).
is a lot better than what you get from a scientist bulb (~1,7k
) like you note.
), so this makes big impact on early expansion (need whips, need chops, need base production to finish it in time - might be little place for >1 settler). Reason why I never feel bad about wonder that nets huge amount of commerce overall and works up to time when player is going to found Corporations or need Infantries or win Dom/Conquest/UN 
