They're fine as it is, its just that piling them up to bulb them to get to space techs at light speed is the equivalent of bribing all the city-states on the turn before the WL vote as Venice.. it works, but it's boring and it renders some of the late game features like the ISS pointless.
It's a clever enough trick for the higher, almost purely strategic levels, but on the mid and lower levels it makes that victory too easy and formulaic (the bigger challenge is to avoid a CV or DipV before you can have your SV, but those arriving too early to play the information era as conceived is another issue...)
