I think many players have taken the best of both worlds and run a hybrid. Consider that a sliding scale, where mass-cottaging is a CE and mass specialists is an SE. Even with an SE, most players will cottage their Capitol, to take advantage of Bureaucracy when it comes online, and even in a CE, most players run a GP farm, or run scientists early to maintain reasearch while using the slider to pay for expansion.
Yep, I find the CE/SE labels useful as a discription of the main source of beakers but most civs I run are hybrids to some extent