Part of it is that you need 6 or 8 techs, which take forever to get. If there were 80 sub parts you could at least do something at each step and pay attention to it.
It depends who you are though. As Japan you can westernize in the late 50's easily. As just about anyone else you're looking at 1880's and by then all of the great powers have a huge tech lead and you're lucky if you can catch up by 1900. While you're waiting there's a lot you can think about doing. I keep trying to form india as Panjab, and before I get sphered I can conquer 2 neighbours (afghanistan and Kalat usually) and then I grab johore for the gold mines, and even then the moment I'm sphered I have no money due to no tariff income, which means I can't fund clergy for RP. So you end up sitting around accomplishing not very much.
Couple that with the trainwreck that is the economy and playing as an unciv other than japan isn't very fun. When you can *finally* start building factories you can't build anything that's profitable, assuming you can get resources for it at all.
Part of the problem I think comes from how the AI doesn't destroy low profitability factories for higher profitability ones, and that a single currency traps everyone into being greece or germany, and starting as an unciv makes you greece. If I could devalue my own labour (or index labour costs and productivity to literacy, but at different multipliers, so that low literacy makes your production cheap, but well... you can only make cheap stuff). I think the other issue comes from interventionist and state capitalists keeping factories open that have no demand, and aren't anywhere near having demand. I'm looking at you glass and steel factories that are overproducing by a factor of 2.
