+1 to this request.

+1 to this, I agree 100%

I agree with this in spirit. I always play random and have spawned next to an angry Monty, Shaka, or Caesar to know that it really stresses the early game, and it's much worse the higher the difficulty setting goes because they always forward settle on you with their free settlers.

This is a discussion that goes similarly to the AI discussion though. There are a lot of factors to how a human might want to distribute factions on a map so each has a fair chance. How would you do it? What parameters would you tell the programmers that they must consider when writing code to spawn leaders?

* Equidistance? - do we want leaders to be reasonably well spread across the map?
* Buffer distance? - is there a certain range that we want to guarantee other leaders will not spawn within?
* Natural barriers/city-states - these naturally block off expansion. You can't expand into the ocean, into mountains, or into a neighboring city-state, so should there be some sort of check to ensure there is viable space for a 2nd and/or 3rd city nearby?
* Resources? - whether they're luxuries, strategics, or bonuses, these can make or break your early game. Do want to ensure that a certain number are within close proximity? soft cap? hard cap?
* Start biases - different civs have different start biases intended to reflect their real-life geographies. This is necessary because a lot of civs have unique tile improvements or leader bonuses connected to the land or certain uses of the land. How strict should these be?

As you can see, some of this can end up getting to be quite complicated to do, especially if you're trying to ensure some sense of actual randomness and variability map to map and game to game.

How might you do it?

Unfortunately there's one huge problem with truly random spawns, the ability to restart on a fresh map. Players will absolutely abuse the restart option until they have the upper hand on the AI, or at least not a terrible start. So a random spawn is just random rerolling until you're happy. You should advocate for a slider for minimum spawn distance or something. It would make map creation take longer but at least you'd have less rerolling.

I believe it was 4 that had an option to set the era ad starting position. I did not like it since it took away the fun of the game.