I think the point with Phoenicia is supposed to be that you'll play the tech tree differently than you would with other civs. If you play them as a vanilla civ with some other pasted-on abilities you're going to be disappointed.
Indeed. In my playing of them, they lend themselves to building a network of cheap harbors as settler factories, and maxing out trade routes. They obviously get their real snowball going with Ancestral Hall, both for its innate bennies and the extra trade routes. This is all sort of counter-intuitive considering that they're Phoenicia and superficially appear focused on the early eras, but that's not to say it's any more terrible than other civ's whose suites focus on the later game.
What upcoming buff is this?
Yeah, honestly I don't even really know what to do with them. They usually just end up hanging out in the middle of the ocean for most of the game
I don't see any strong synergies. Not since we stopped being able to double-dip trade routes. There's a one-sided +2 adjacency bonus, but that's compelling reason to add a whole new district.
They should let a ship within their command range heal outside of friendly territory. Or, y'know, get rid of that limitation altogether. I don't know what land units are doing to raise their dead that naval units can't do.
To me synergy connotes things working together to get something you couldn't get individually. Doubling down on them for mo money is the kind of min-maxing that devalues players' respect for gold, because you just get so much of it that there's no meaningful meta. Some of those things you mentioned maybe should go the way of double-dipping trade routes. Which is why I advocate a commercial harbor being exclusive with commercial hubs the way water parks are exclusive from entertainment centers.
