The grab bag surprises one finds when entering huts are lots of fun. Huts frequently offer gold, and sometimes provide scientific advances.
What could be wrong with the hut freebies? Well, those same huts provide rewards to the AI opponents too.
Even worse, the AI does not enter huts early in the game, but saves them for the later stages when scientific advances are much more difficult to achieve.
Very often, an AI will enter a hut, and get rewarded with a scientific advance, sometimes at levels that are more advanced than the one the AI is working on. Then the different AI opponents will swap advances, or simply capture each other's cities to win an advance, and all the AI opponents gain advances from all of the huts.
The rewards I got from entering huts were not as valuable as the ones I lost by the advances given to the AI opponents.
My solution is to level that playing field by reducing the number of huts to zero at the beginning of a new game (More game options -> Geological tab at the bottom).
Now my civ is a little slower than the AI in the early game, but I more than make up for that in the later stages when the AI cannot get free advances from huts.
