I am still not convinced that 1) Rhineland 4) Four Year Plan is optimal. Nor has anyone showed the actual math in doing Export Focus/Free Trade second as opposed to third, what the actual net benefit in civs and research days is.
Not that you are going to get this message because you got me ignored. If someone wants to quote or say this in their own words, feel free.
Rhineland first for obvious PP jumpstart and prevent France from wanting to challenge. You seem to agree on this point. Some people that don't care for the 5 WT allowing some of the democracies access to their industrial focuses early and they might delay rhineland, but that is a different discussion.
Army innovations second because it brings you to treaty, and largely only because it brings you to treaty. The doctrine research boost is nice though.
Treaty third because it forces the Soviets to dedicate one of their 3 research slots to heavy tanks instead of industrial/research techs and slows down their growth. This also lets you start rushing your tank tech earlier. The longer you delay your tank tech, the less of those tanks you're going to have to fight with. Having more factories doesn't really help if you are producing worse equipment than what you would otherwise have. Rather than comparing factory counts, we should probably be comparing quantity and quality of equipment. You don't like tech rushing and especially don't like '39 panthers, so you probably don't care about this. You also prefer single player where the soviets are all sorts of inefficient and you throwing a wrench into their plans doesn't matter when they've thrown 5 of their own into it.
4 year plan fourth because you can't do it earlier on account of the other things. It is also conveniently the point where (with either juggling or an early free trade/krupp) you have finished dispersed 1, and can start dispersed 2 without using the boost from 4YP, so you can save it for either dispersed 3, or if you tech steal dispersed 3, construction 4. This either grant you and earlier construction 4 and therefore earlier construction 5, or an early enough dispersed 2/3 that you can keep building in rhineland/wurttemberg/westfalen before you get autobahn and switch to the +100%'s with lots of slots. My testing of these timings ignored agency, so you do technically have looser tolerances until you fill up the slots, but you'll be getting autobahn eventually and switching anyway.
Doing 4YP earlier so you can get the HG-werke and KDF wagen earlier is going to disrupt your research timings (dispersed 2 earlier before it is required, dispersed 3 way later) and is going to delay treaty from third to at least 7th, probably 8th or 9th (after research slot and maybe autobahn) which is about a year and a half into the game and greatly diminishes the value of doing the treaty at all which is otherwise a rather powerful bonus.
Delaying 4YP and as a result, HG-werke to 6th and KDF to 7th instead of probably 4th and 5th is a loss of 1400~ or so factory days if we assume 2 are lost to consumer goods. That is a whole extra factory and a bit which is certainly a good thing. Extra factories are good, and the earlier you get them the bigger your snowball gets. But lets refer to an earlier point. What are you using these factories to do? You're going to be way behind on your tank unlocks which means that even with an extra factory or two, You are either producing a worse equipment, or have produced a smaller amount of the equipment because you had to wait longer before you could even start producing it, even if you had more factories to assign to it. Delaying treaty makes your enemies stronger (if they were competent enough to take advantage of the opportunity) and yourself weaker.
Edit. In case the mention of it earlier was glanced over, 4yp fourth requires either research juggling, or an earlier krupp/free trade (why bother with just moving up to export focus) in order to meet the timing. If you aren't doing 4yp fourth, having free trade or krupp earlier doesn't matter near as much. But in the same vein of you arguing to take 4YP second so you can rush the factories, why not also rush free trade for the extra construction and research speed (that gets more construction speed faster) so you can get even moar factories? Delaying free trade and war economy so you can get hess and bormann hurts your economy and research now so you can have more high command in time for a war later. I'd rather strengthen the research and economy so I can just have more of a better thing and later boost it further with high command, than have less stuff or worse stuff, but boost it with high command and later replace it with better stuff. The stuff is a larger factor than the officers, more often than not.
