I agree, as much as I hate Reddit's leadership and a lot of the toxicity of the hivemind, it will be a long time before anything reaches the level of niche communities it has with a critical mass of users and I miss some of them.
Sometimes you just want to geek out about something small with the 40 people across the planet that actually care about it.
Seriously. I remember first getting into Deity and realizing it's basically just exploiting intimate knowledge of how the AI works. The actual max difficulty is Prince, where the AI doesn't get bonuses, and it's so terrible at actually pursuing an agenda it's not very challenging.
I am a bit hopeful that VII's decoupling leaders and civs will force the AI to be a bit more generally good. At least make it so you don't know exactly what sort of tactics to use from the first turn you meet it.