Part of the problem with the Civ4 AI is that you can either design a great realistic experience, or you can design a great chess game. Doing both is not only very difficult, but it's impossible in some situations. Free gifts from your friends is one of them. Realistically, if you ask for help from your allies, there are definitely times when they'll give it to you for free. In a competitive game against the AI, however, the system breaks down. Unless you get a diplomatic penalty from asking for stuff too often, it's going to be a good idea to constantly ask the AI for free stuff.
In a realistic game, which is partly represented by how multiplayer "free for alls" turn out, nations would attack eachother for resources, territory, and important locations. I've never seen the Civ4 AI attack to capture a resource, build an empire, or acquire a coastal city. The Civ4 AI is designed in this respect to be more tuned to competitive play; humans can understand when the AI will attack you. You know if they're upset, and exactly what's causing it. If you share a religion with the AI, they're not going to be particularly inclined to atack you.
There is a lot of sound logic behind this; how fun is it to be attacked by an AI that's lightyears ahead of you in technology because of free bonuses without being able to disuade them at all? Maintenance is another decision which is slated much more towards the "chess game." Rome was a huge empire, and it certainly wasn't limited by arbitrary boundaries placed on it to limit the snowball effect. Whatever we think about how maintenance is implimented into the game, it does a good job of slowing down the snowball effect. It's not entirely historically accurate, it makes conquering other countries much less appealing, and it may have a plethera of other side effects, but it's the best so far in Civ.
As someone who plays primarily multiplayer, on the rare instance that I do play single player, I want a more historic and relaxing experience. A tough AI is all well and good, but what I'm looking for is something that's more realistic than the "chess game" of playing against other humans. Obviously other people enjoy playing against the AI for a "chess game," even if the AI is much less competitant and scheming than humans are. In the game itself there has to be some sort of balance in certain situations. One of those is the AI gifting techs when you ask for them. If the game is going to have things like this in it, it might be a good idea to ban them from competitions at Realms Beyond.
Perhaps rather than an exploit, classify them as "unintentional micromanagement." Asking for free techs constantly is obviously exploiting the kindness of the AI, and humans would soon tire of this. Asking for something free once in a while isn't exploitative though, but it is unfair if certain players get techs and others don't. It's also unreasonable to put a cap on the number of times a player can ask for something from the AI. The most realistic way to solve the problem would be to have an AI that tires of being asked for free stuff after a certain number of times, but I doubt this will happen. Even if it does, some players will get lucky and hit the AI when it's willing to give things, and others won't.
Anyway, this is just what I was thinking about on the issue. I'm far from an active poster here and I haven't actually played any of the events (other than the brief opening of Epic 4), but I do read reports here quite often, and thought I might as well post my opinion on this
.
) know what's up and how to fix it.
.
Nevertheless, I'll switch over to using "ADV#" tags for the future, since it sounds like some folks are running into problems with this. Don't expect me to go through and change all the current ones though. 
. Plus it means less time for each game, so I can play and report more