If throwing people at a problem could do things like make large hydraulic structures that can withstand massive flow rates, why in hell was China dealing with a dike system that regularly failed just from heavy rain? The literally threw something like 5% of the world's population at the dike system, but it never came anywhere close to dealing with 80 ft rises. England owning half of Europe isn't going to matter worth a damn.
And please don't be daft about the needed underpinnings for discovering industrial processes. Take Bessimer steel - where did that come from? Well first you had to have a bajillion iron foundries so that one guy could have an industrial accident and notice that at high temperatures pig iron can be purified merely by oxygen contact; pretty much all the established understandings of steel manufacture (including those based on the most cutting edge theories of chemistry) specifically held that injecting air would lower iron temperature which would not produce steel. That in turn requires a ready market for mass iron production (i.e. railroads) and better working knowledge of elements as well as acid/base chemistry. Of course then you need to introduce manganese, so that means cooking hemitite and purified oxygen. Lest we forget, this is a global shipping problem too. Getting enough coke, manganese, etc. shipped around is going to swamp the logistics network of 1800.
And yes there are reasons why germ theory couldn't happen earlier. You needed better optics (and that takes a bucketful of upstream technologies), you need the ability to make fine glass (which can withstand repeated sterilizations and standard mass/volumes). You need model organisms (like how Pasteur studied silk worm diseases). You need organic chemistry.
The industrial revolution wasn't something that happened because the government went in and said "Hey let's do X", quite the opposite in fact. Watt built a better steam engine because the Newcomens were present in the mines, but rather inefficient. They in turn present because there was a market for the coal being pulled out below the water table which in turn happened because of colder weather and centuries of deforestation. The government actively tried to ban the use of coal - it simply advocated importing more wood/charcoal. And throwing more manpower at the "heating problem" would almost certainly have resulted in either conquest of timber rich coast and more ships to move it.
In every field there were hundreds of years of lead in to get to the industrial revolution. Germ theory has necessary antecedents going back past the 14th century and it was rarely silent for even a generation. Same thing with steel production - it continuously evolved over centuries. Most of the things that "caused" the industrial revolution are already well underway at game start. Speeding it up, well that simply isn't viable. Machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and telegraphs are all vastly closer to viable in the EU era than the Panama canal is. You play a nation, not a god.
Thankfully, this hopefully will be something rare that doesn't screw up the historical chokepoints and naval patterns. I get Pdox wants to do some interesting stuff, honestly I think they do better with something like allowing certain bottle neck straights (e.g. the Dardenelles, the Oresund) to be fortified and closed to hostile ships. Or perhaps finally let us build ships on the Caspian and Great Lakes. Panama - sorry that is just insanely too far out of time period.
