Are gather-rate improvement cards bad?

I've mostly played comp-skirmishes so far, and always included a lot of gather-rate improvement cards like furrier that sort of thing, but when I'm looking at people's decks ESCO strategy wall, I see very few suggested decks with these, have I been playing wrong? Are their only a few of these that are good? British are probably my favorite civ, though I also like french, japanese, and indian if that helps advice-wise.