Well, not every city is going to be cottaged, is it? With spiritual cities become more versatile, because you can change the civics to suit different ways of using cities. You can switch between slavery and caste system so you can whip some cities and get GPs with other cities, and can swap between nationalism and free speech and vassalage, depending on if you need cannon fodder, highly promoted troops, or a financial advantage.
Basically, both spiritual and financial provide you with flexibility, so that's really only valuable when you base your play around taking advantage of that flexibility. Spiritual gives you the ability to use ALL the civics by switching for short bursts when they're valuable, and financial gives you the flexibility to focus on something else while still keeping up in finances, in addition to focusing on cottages for a tech lead.
Absolutely agreed. And you need a few farms anyway, even in CE, so that city growth isn't uselessly slow, and for a fair slab of the game you won't be using all the available terrain anyway, so a few extra farms (preferably situated in city overlap) won't do any harm. With a Spiritual hybrid, you just have a couple more farms, and then ever so briefly abandon your cottages during periods of caste system/pacifism to generate massive GPPs. You're still getting almost the full power of cottages, plus a powerful GP generation bonus.
This is not Mansa-specific, but when running CE under a Spiritual leader, I will generally use my CS/Pacifism bursts to turn pretty much every city where it's even vaguely feasible into a temporary GP farm. Over a few bursts, they really add up, to the point where pretty much every city can produce 1 or even 2 GPs over the course of the game, aside from the GP farm(s) that are spewing them out. Takes some micromanagement to juggle, but the results are very impressive.
And even with Mansa, in that brief period between Constitution and Democracy, Representation is the civic of choice for Spiritualists and there's very little economic penalty for going completely nuts with specialists (especially when emancipation will soon come along to help compensate for lost development), so that you can finish off the accumulated GPPs in a bunch of cities and then switch back to cottages pretty much forever.
Something I've recently discovered for some Spiritual leaders, but particularly suited to Mansa, is the atheistic Shwedagon Paya beeline. Try to secure gold or marble, beeline aesthetics and hope you pick up a foreign religion along the way (you're pretty much bound to). Run huge amounts of cottages all along the way. Then you can quickly pop a Great Scientist to build an academy without having to worry about bulbing Philosophy or anything, pop over to OR and whip out a bunch of missionaries to get your religion everywhere, and then do all the lovely religion things without spending a whole load of commerce on religious techs, or switch to FR and get a nice tech boost without annoying anyone. Plus aesthetics is good for trade and you get first dibs at the other GP generation wonders (parthenon/GL/NE).
