My personal opininon on the lux distribution, almost ALL of them give gold with some exceptions so the actual luxuries aren't the problem, they are fairly even, it's the required techs and terrain they spawn on that makes the tiles so different:
Mining resources: great to settle on if hill/mining and also on your early tech path to forest chopping so connected quicker for trades or early gold to AI, but harder to work if you don't settle on them as they provide no growth. Exception: when you are building settlers. Because of this I find mining luxes even better if I'm expanding with liberty but not necessarily OP with tradition games where you are really only building 2 settlers in the capital, buying the 3rd, and then growing. What is more important is opportunity to grow in this scenario
Calendar Resources: slow to connect because not high priority on early tech path, this often means you get the gold or duplicate luxes from trading them later. Many people consider them terrible but I don't mind them. They often provide a 2 food 2 gold tile to work when you run out of other nearby things for some early gold meaning you have more above-average tiles to work and they synergize well with golden ages giving 4 gold each on the base tile and are actually workable early when growing. You have to give up a little growth to work them but at least you aren't losing food by doing so. Also they tend to cluster so starting near calendar resources often means you get more duplicate luxes. Lastly, the two special ones: citrus and cocoa, give bonus food to the base tile really buffing jungle starts in recent patches. I consider a cocoa/citrus/jungle start VERY good for fast science. You have poorer production, but there are usually some riverside hills to clear and it ends up working out since you can choose to settle an expo in a higher-production area.
Sea Luxuries: Very nice. I consider sea luxes one of the best starts. After lighthouse every one provides 3 food, some production AND gold. The only downside is to get them you have to give up some land tiles for coast. Whales in particular are bonus food so you grow fast with that lux. Very well-balanced. the tech is a little out of the way but if you start on the coast opening the sea techs for early cargo ship and lighthouses early is pretty optimal anyway.
Trapping Resources: furs, truffles, ivory - these are probably the worst in my opinion from a tech standpoint. Why? Because they are the furthest along the tech path. If you go for trapping early you divert from what I consider the optimal tech path for both liberty and tradition so usually they just sit there unimproved for longer and by the time they get connected the AI have usually traded away their first round of duplicate luxes to each other. However, there is one thing that counter-balances and makes these luxes OP: the +1 food from camps pantheon. It's a gamble, but I've had many a high-trapping start that turned amazing with this pantheon. Also, since they appear on forest there is a hidden bonus to these: they are 1 food, 1 production, gold tiles so they are workable and give your city early production and a forest tile to chop for a production boost. If the underlying terrain is grassland they become food-neutral like calendar resources, if plains the yield doesn't change. However, if tundra you can't afford to chop, another reason why tundra is harder because you can't afford to chop forest and get the early production boost.
On thing about tundra I haven't seen mentioned on this thread though is that the start balancer actually gives you more bonus resources to make up for being in poor terrain like tundra--same with desert and this is why flood-plain starts are broken because they aren't actually bad. This is why it is common in a tundra start to see like 5+ deer and river or something. As long as you start in forest with some growth tiles like this, tundra is not that hard to play for this reason. The downsides only really occur later in the game when your bonus tiles are all worked as the base terrain is poorer. Riverside tundra is 1 less food, etc. An upside of it is that usually only 1-2 players start near tundra so if it is you the Dance of Aurora pantheon is not that hard to get meaning a free religion with strong lategame faith income. I enjoy playing tundra for these reasons, it's different but not bad.
