Number of patents filed is a terrible measure of anything except how many bureaucrats you employ.
Too bad I said "sent", not "filed".
I am not saying that the relationship between population size and scientific progress is 1:1. I simply disagree with using China and India as examples considering they actually are leading in things we can actually see, such as academic papers and patent applications.
But I agree. It is hard to determine who is and isn't a "leading scientific power". We can merely give a rough list based on things we can see and count. I also agree that the relationship between population size and "scientific output" is pretty complex. After all, China went centuries where it most definitely wasn't in the lead by any metric.
Never heard anyone seriously complaining about not-size-scaling research cost in EU4, though one might be puzzled at some point by Mainz being ahead of France .
Doesn't EUIV avoid the issue because mana isn't really tied to size?
They went through a phase of a few hundred years where they became hide bound traditionalists that set them behind rather recently allowing other nations to surpass them. Since that phase ended they've made up tremendous ground on the leading nations so they are once again considered a world superpower.
That is a really really really really simplistic analysis of Chinese history.