I guess it's the moral imperative of "should" that bugged me. Sure, I agree, under most (I would disagree that all, especially for temples) circumstances, happiness-only buildings are a bad idea even on Chieftain (actually, unless you're of chieftain-level skill level, they're more so on Chieftain, since you have even LESS unhappiness to fight!). But that you "shouldn't" build them was just too much much finger-waving for my gall bladder.

If it's more fun for you personally to build them than not to do so, then you definitely should build them, because having fun is the whole point!
MAS, I agree with you about poor balancing. Sometimes I wish Civ were open source, as then we would see more frequent official releases with incremental improvements to play balance. Moddability is definitely great, but I personally feel very strange playing modded games, as I have a weird feeling that I'm not playing the "real" game.
That said, modding down happiness building costs by about a third might make it more optimal for me to play in a way that's more fun, and boost the AI slightly, since they have a greater tendency to build them, and tend to underuse the slider.
I wish I had a computer that could play Civ 4. I got a chance to play it for about 10 hours, and have followed the Civ 4 forums a lot, and it really does seem to be a step forwards, yes, forwards. Yah yah, it's got too many shiny things. Deal with it. In three years (and remember, we're talking intently here about Civ 3 three years or more after release), those shiny things will run on a reasonably cheap computer. Blah blah etc. [/flamebaiting rant]
Lo5