I have mixed feelings about the game and this rant... although as expected there are people complaining about certain failings of the latest Civ iteration, I couldn't disagree more with some issues the OP has, especially the first few.
Let's face it... nothing was added to this game. It's a reduction of all the Civ 4 concepts and it feels like Civ 4 For Kids. What exactly is new here besides additional restrictions? You can move in fewer directions; you can't stack; you can't build as many units because you can't stack; they removed religion. Oh, so they added city states. I like the "Independents" in Rhye's and Fall much better. The city states just end up being conquered... eventually.
You started off with less directions to move in? Seriously? The Hexagonal system is one of the largest IMPROVEMENTS made in this game over the last. The 8 tile system was unnatural, looked ugly as hell compared to this, and most importantly, made controlling territory a pain when units would slip by diagonally. I'm glad it's gone.
Your second complaint is also ironically something which targets a major improvement. Stacking equated to one of the most boring combat systems in strategy games to date. My only issue with the single-unit system is that it sometimes results in traffic jams and gives me a bit more hassle when moving units around.
The third complaint in this list is only true in the sense that the player has more trouble getting his or her units to the front of the battle, and perhaps the addition of limited units per resource. My unit production was just as fast as it was in Civ 4.
Religion I can see as a legitimate complaint about lost features. However, I didn't care much for the Civ 4 version and feel they could implement it better.
I never played much of Rhye's and Fall (crashed my old computer) so I can't comment much about Independents vs. City States. I will agree that they aren't as interesting as they could be.
The Great Wonders? Not wonderful... actually pretty boring with little overall gameplay effect. The interface is absolutely terrible to manage all the numbers and metrics with your civ because they hide all the buttons and numbers that were in Civ 4. Really though... aren't all the numbers and readouts all part of the fun of this game?? There's so little thought or strategy needed to play this. Every unit is it's own transport, so the ocean is just one big highway for all your units since most can move faster (or as fast) over water.
I sorta agree with you that the Wonders are lackluster. They're okay, but I wasn't quite as motivated to pursue them as I did in earlier civs.
The readouts do suck in comparison to earlier Civilization games and I was particularly annoyed by the lack of clear diplomacy feedback. Not knowing how my actions are effecting diplomacy didn't exactly improve my gameplay experience. Also the occasional rankings when somebody writes a book? Totally not funny or witty. They were annoyingly droll.
As for the Embark thing... HATE HATE HATE IT. I knew it would be a problem when I heard about it and even in my first game, in which I was largely land-locked, it resulted in a few instances where the enemy unit would ignore a channel because he could walk right over it. It's also a pita not having ANY travel between land-masses for my land units until the Embarkation tech.
There's no sliders to shift funds from the treasury to research. Expansion simply causes unhappiness, which is easily fixed and it slows down your social progress... snore!
I didn't really miss the tech/wealth/culture sliders too much. They hardly added anything and ended up eating a lot of my time as I'd try to maximize wealth or tech each turn.
What I really really hated, beyond the Embark thing, is how the save feature and other important options were ******ED, in multiple senses of the word. I can't understand how somebody could have decided to remove save sorting and then that saves should be listed alphabetically of all things. I'm still floored by the stupidity of that decision. It's a 'simplification' that makes the game more tedious for crying out loud. Freakin' DUMB.
... Seriously. Un-freakin-believable.
