There is a 2021 translation,
Au commencement était, from LLL. The underlying overlap between the civics trio and your suggestions for governors would seem to be acknowledgement of a space above governors, policies, and even governments, but below civilizations and leaders, both wide-reaching and progressive.
No easy solution on my part for the unlocks
I agree that governor titles and culture thresholds borrow against the late-game experience, though they do represent an effort to pace progress. With these traditional mechanisms, I could see the civics as either
Civ V's menu or
Civ VI's tree. I could
also see them as a series of binary choices as in
Humankind: What do we do with war captives? What is the nature of our secret knowledge? How do we decide on our leaders? etc.
Translating the sovereignty/bureaucracy/politics concepts give us three, and I like the three, but I can easily imagine a related mechanism with more options. One bonus with the trio is their representation of common play-styles (expansion, builder, combat). That said, they strike me as useful more as they would offer early trade-offs. A player might prefer a builder style but recognize resources or terrain that incentivize sovereignty. It would be playing the map with consequences in a subset of early-game civics and religious beliefs. In this sense, it strikes me as more akin to
Civ V's ideologies, where somewhat overlapping tenets offer significant strategic and gameplay differences, though permanent and starting with the early game.
I think the main difference would be repurposing the civics tree to model something like state complexity. Players would start specialized in one of three and gradually converge on more powerful synergies of statecraft like state surveillance and democratic elections. This would revive some of the eagerness to unlock civics but especially tenets from
Civ V.
I am not set on bringing governors forward, particularly as I have more exposure now to how they work in
Old World with influence from the
Endless heroes that somehow did not make it into
Humankind... Even so,
Civ VI-style governors show how charisma could play a greater role, with candidates having
potential in addition to their inherent values. While there is a point in
Civ VI where governors cycle/sleep/garrison, that kind of rote assignment is harder in
Old World where there are a lot of candidates who represent yield tradeoffs if not outright harm.