Disagree on this for the most part. Maps are often very unengaging and result in more abandoned games than anything else. Luxury resources are more homogeneous than in V (because other than granaries, they didn't bring in any of the resource-augmenting buildings),
Also, the distribution of luxuries is literally more homogeneous, due to what we've been told of the way map generation works (each continent is allocated two resources at random and will only have those).
and too easy to downplay now that entertainment centers fill the happiness hole.
Well, those take district slots. The bigger issue is that unhappiness is practically irrelevant and controlling it isn't worth the investment. In one recent game I'd expanded so much that most of my cities were unhappy - amounting to a 5% hit to resource outputs each of which was around 100. It just isn't worth the investment in entertainment districts or buildings just to save 5 science/culture a turn, and the drop is only that high if the entire empire is unhappy. Unless a specific city is producing most of a given resource, unhappiness in one city is entirely irrelevant unless it's a border city that needs positive amenities to retain loyalty. In my play, and in Let's Plays I've seen, people seem to make efforts to control happiness through habit more than anything else.
Would be nice to feel like bonus resources were good to work rather than to harvest, but a +1 yield of some type isn't really that relevant. Guess if it's cattle or sheep the .5 housing is something.
+1 on pastures is important in the early game or in new cities because the extra yield is production.
Really would help if trade routes were tied into the tile improvements rather than supplanting them.
Indeed this was the genius of BNW which for some reason was rolled back in both Beyond Earth (which overpowered trade routes as a result) and Civ VI. Gold wasn't available in the landscape outside of specific luxury resources and some Natural Wonders, so you were reliant on trade - and on city placement that improved trade income, either on rivers or along the coast - to actually pay maintenance costs and expand, never mind earn gold income. And, yes, in Civ V trade values were affected by the luxury and strategic resources available to each city (if I recall correctly these only counted for trade value once improved).
Of course this was undermined in practice by players who favoured min-maxing because in Civ V it was notoriously easy to exploit the AI for gold in trade deals, but if you played in the spirit of the game this was the best system Civ has yet come up with for pacing expansion and development and doing so in a way that actually makes real world sense.
If I have a farmbelt city, it should be able to act as a breadbasket for other cities.
This is a definite weakness of Civ VI - city specialisation isn't encouraged, and to some extent is limited too strongly by the district system. With settler production having been decoupled from food and a system of Great People production that isn't linked to specialists (and so city population size), the 'food cities' of past Civ games are a thing of the past. In Civ VI an area with a lot of food and little production is just an outright bad city spot, where it could be specialised into productive land in previous Civ games and was usually actively desirable in the early game.
That said, certain buildings and districts do affect food, production and gold from trade routes. Civ VI lacks agricultural districts, but I think granaries affect food output from trade.
If I have a big mining city, it should be where I'm sending hammers from.
This does actually work. Base production from trade is low enough that it makes a big difference if you have industrial zones and encampments boosting trade values, and industrial zones themselves benefit from mines.
The only thing I hate about emperor difficulty is the two settlers AI gets.
I have never played on immortal or deity, it's always emperor, i have played maybe five or six games on prince and king when the game came out. Deity demands too much min maxing, and it just doesn't suit my play style.
As others have said above, this is a misconception. You'll see people on Let's Plays min-maxing (which is why I've largely stopped watching them as it's divorced from both my playstyle and the way I'm interested in playing the game), but it is in no way necessary in Civ VI.
