While the culture picking system is certainly impactful from a strategic perspective, I think that, ultimately, it makes the end result lack any sort of cohesive identity. Being able to swap from Agrarian to Gold to Militarist every era really doesn't give any final culture amalgamation a distinct feel.

Even putting the visually jarring/actual culture name aspects aside, I think the game may have been better served by tying your cultural choices to either your first few picks, your policy axis decisions, or just letting you make something from scratch instead of using actual cultures. This way it would feel like your choices actually mattered more than just from the min-max FIMSI perspective. In short, you'd be put onto a branching path of cultures or something of the sort based on your choices that would make you create something that felt a bit more unique and distinct each game than what the current system provides.

Right now, there's really no impact to your choices because you can always just swap to another strategy the following era or even use something completely different each era. That's just my thoughts, however. I'm interested to see what others think about this.