Civ V is a great game.

[MxM]

The argument that "religions aren't/won't be in the game because they had to much effect on diplomacy" is nonsense given that a simple XML edit can remove the diplomatic effects entirely.

Then what would be the point of having religions? Their primary goal is diplomatic. The rest is just religious buildings, which could have been renamed to something else, and unnecessary micro of building missionaries to propagate religion. Religion without politics simply does not make sense and not fun in terms of Civ IV. It is the struggle between "do I keep my religion and piss off neighbors but get benefit from it, or do I go no state religion or somebody else religion to have better relationship with neighbor but no or less advantage in terms of cities and special buildings" that kept religion relevant in Civ IV.

[Proteus_MST]

This is not the explanation I heard from Firaxis again and again. They did not like how religion dominates diplomacy, they wanted diplomacy to be more natural and dynamic, depending on many actions of player, not only which religion he founds. This is why religion was removed and CS were introduced. And I agree with them, I like this diplomatic model better, when you or AI starts war not because it just happen that you discover different technologies and thus found different religions, but because you are fighting for the resource - a city state.

Which is strange, considering the fact that in Civ IV you had many different AI personalities... some which were religious nuts (like Isabella of Spain) but many many more leaders who didn´t care too much about your religion and would become allies of civs with foreign religions, if it suited their tastes.
Therefore it shouldn´t be too much of a problem to build an AI that variies in the degree with which it cares about the religion of other civs

The only problem I see would be in finetuning AI behavior, which exactly needs the thing I outlined, i.e. enough time to run testsessions with AIs that have varying degrees of religious conviction

[Handel]

Seems a lot of ppl like Civ V and this is good. It is probably a good game if you play several days and get used to it. The problem is I somehow have no desire to play it all:-(