Sorry for not replying for a while here - I've been quite sick, so any progress on this front is going to be slow.
But generally I agree with the idea that new nations should emerge strong and competitive. The crumble of nations in C2C produces terrible civs in part because new nations receive bonuses that have never been tailored to C2C scales, and in part because of the general push towards slowness in C2C. (And, of course, because the AI didn't actually understand/manage revolution causes in many cases, but that's a separate issue)
IMO, C2C has been squeezing the dynamism out of the game for a long time; food wastage, ridiculously fortified cities, and continual slow culture growth combine to create a situation in which old cities are powerful cities. I think the general goal has been to make the game last longer by making it difficult to do anything except accrete power steadily.
This is why you have a few starting cities that will be your most powerful forever (despite that making no sense), and why younger barbarian/rev nations will always be useless. Tech boosts may help them stay relevant, but they can't compete with 400+ turns of culture/population growth.
This isn't really related to revolutions specifically, but its been bugging me for a while.
In any case, I think we could easily make "Rev for humans only" an option; I'm not at all interested in playing a rev game without AI rev, personally. Many of the biggest issues in rev aren't limited to the AI either, specifically Eternal Crime Explosions, whole-scale collapse during a war, and unavoidable early game revolutions in rare instances (despite them being one-city states!).
