Exactly. This little discussion started by a post by Aussie_Lurker who said that it would be better if players had "difficult" decisions right from the start. IMHO, making more governments from the start would make maybe the variety bigger, but certainly wouldn't make decisions harder. Now you have just 1 M and 1 E slot and you have to deal with it. And right from the start you have 2 quite good militaric cards and 2 quite good economic cards. In fact this particular part of the game and these two decisions are the most interesting for me maybe in the whole game

Because you have clear choices (not 20 cards to choose from, only 2+2) and all the options can be good in some situations.
I'm pretty sure that if I had the choice to select a different combination of slots, I would be always (90 %) picking just one of them, exactly like with the tier 2 & 3 governments (merchant republic, democracy). If there was an option E+E, I would always have +1 gold +1 faith in capital and +1 production in all cities. And I would produce 1 more military unit to deal with barbarians without the +5 combat bonus

(Btw, I don't play on deity.)