I thought a goal of the rather massive overhaul of the medieval trees was to make them all flexible or applicable to more types of empires, not just a choice based on how large you are.
Statecraft has a lot of powerful things, I'm not disputing that. And its probably better for more of a medium sized empire than a super tall (who sometimes have difficulty competing for CS). But the almost total lack of per city benefits really impacts its flexibility, IMO. Even if food CS hits every city, additional cities directly hurt the culture and science from CS, and make the free military units, faith or gold less important (as tradition I sometimes get 50% of my faith from CS. I don't think its possible for wide progress to do so)
Very few CS rewards are per city though, and I think this comes down to Enrico's original complaint. There is very little about the tree that scales with number of cities. In my most recent game, I took fealty instead solely because statecraft's happiness just seemed way too weak.The adopter is basically huge on wide already. +50% Rewards is a lot especially when given to all cities on some rewards as it could mean an additional promotion or a turn shave off your next tech or policy. The CS huge reward was just an experiment to see how powerful it was if people actually did the quest instead of trying to oh what a coincidence guess I'll do the same and get a side-reward. So far, the CS quests that are won passively(most culture, most faith, etc) are rewarded less than CS quests won actively(construct this building within 30 turns, trade with us, or conquer this city!)
Statecraft has a lot of powerful things, I'm not disputing that. And its probably better for more of a medium sized empire than a super tall (who sometimes have difficulty competing for CS). But the almost total lack of per city benefits really impacts its flexibility, IMO. Even if food CS hits every city, additional cities directly hurt the culture and science from CS, and make the free military units, faith or gold less important (as tradition I sometimes get 50% of my faith from CS. I don't think its possible for wide progress to do so)