I can totally see where you're coming from but I think it's a differing view on what it fundamentally means to 'build a nice city'.
In this competitive arena, your current 'city' is the culmination of each game you've played under a certain set of meta-rules self-imposed in conjunction with the nuances of playing as a particular civilization.
While an opponent may only see it for a fleeting moment, your actual, current city is how, given specific starting conditions, under the constraints above, your pre-game-plan and ruleset have been tweaked and optimized to the point where they are not actively in need of changing.
The only resource that really matters is time. A nice city is one that cannot be defeated by an opposing 'city' in any arbitrary amount of time and frees you up to focus on the more reaction-dependent offensive strategy.
edit: Experience is mostly from Empire Earth, YMMV
While it certainly conjures up negative associations for me - I would actually be in favor of a process with similarities to a drive-thru for pick up of online orders.
It may be nice to go inside and browse, but the experience in entropy that is now making even a minor purchase at Apple stores has me in avoidance of them.