Democracy is pointless in civ 7

Just thought I'd post this, and give my reasoning.

Firaxis have designed the modern era ideologies with particular win conditions in mind - you can see this reflected very clearly.

Communism is good for racing through the tech tree, and you get to unlock a policy card that allows you to complete projects faster, as well as defensive buffs to prevent you being taken over.

Fascism is really good for amassing gold and production, and just generally a solid choice for massing units and trying to kill other players.

Then there's democracy. Firaxis have clearly designed this with culture victory in mind - you get culture buffs on specialists, and you get a social policy that helps you build wonders faster, which affects the world's fair. Unfortunately, Democracy fundamentally fails to support its victory type. Why?

Because culture victory is a race. You fundamentally don't have time to dig into your ideology to up your culture - you need to go for natural history, then hegemony RIGHT AWAY! There is simply no time. You need to have a high culture output out of the gate from the prior eras, or you're not going to get enough artifacts from excavating to reliably hit the required 15. You can overbuild and get artifacts there too, but thats entirely down to rng, and thus a bad strategy.

So why not take democracy AFTER getting hegemony? Well, because unfortunately Fascism is just better for you now. You don't need to make culture anymore, in fact your culture providing specialists are now fundamentally dead pops, it's a yield you don't need. Fascism let's you add 3 production to them, and that bonus production helps you with making EVERYTHING, not just wonders. The amount of production it grants you should be outcompeting the wonder construction bonus for making worlds fair. For a similar comparison, check civ 6's france vs Germany. France has a specialised wonder production bonus, but in practice Germany is the better wonder spamming civ because of their Hanza and easy access to high production.

Tl:dr, either culture victory needs a change, or democracy needs a rework to be more worthwhile.