Perfectly backwards. I point at your "increasing military numbers" - at between 4 and 6.5 NW per unit, how is this *NOT* increasing your NW more than the 1 NW pes? And then, you end up with the same military strength, because you lower BE and thus your TG/Fort effect. And then you take from some building you needed... in effect, stealing from more possible TG/Fort to get banks to get your income back up.
I can't say for certainty that lower draft will produce better MPNW (OPNW + DPNW, assuming constant O/D split). I *CAN* say that BE sci is worth it if your TG/Forts are not already MAXED! As in, you have room for 20% TG, 20% forts? Then BE after sci should be .5=X*.8*.2, so BE = 312.5%. Now
of course if BE gets to 150%, you will free up space so you run a higher % of TG/Fort, so noone ever needs 300% BE - but if they did, it'd still be worth it to eat the sci NW!
There's a simple way to see what is happening (the following DOES assume 1.076 ME form pay, but NOT the 1.05 from MP). If you assume land takes up at least 1/4 your NW (it's usually much more for sci) and you keep a 50/50 split on off/def, you CAN'T have better than .448 OPNW and .448 DPNW. And that assumed 100% draft! Now, lets assume Pes take the same NW as the military we replace, and drop to 80% draft. But we get max TG and max fort in exchange... Now we have .493 OPNW and DPNW. *IF* you could magicly run your prov at 100% draft rate, don't your think 80% draft rate would let you max TG and rax?
It gets even better if we realize that our NW/A will go down because pes are lower NW than the troops they replace. I already assumed the best O/NW (1.25) and D/NW (1) units - specs. (elites are better because they reduce the land%. But I just assumed a very low land % to start with.) Now I have to note the land % will go up - but it's total NW added is fixed, the % goes up only because the other part is decreasing. Accounting for this, we find that decreasing the NW gives .528 OPNW and DPNW.
In fact, that 20% draft reduction only requires a 16.67% from your TG/Forts to produce the same military as the 100% draft strat. Shouldn't be that hard to find the space with a huge BE jump and much less need for banks.
The point is, you simple can't get above .448 if you don't use TG/Fort. But there's no reason you can't get above that... in fact, I know high sci human strats that get up to .45/.45. .5/.5 in theory, but no-one ever gets enough sci to pull those off, even with the old human sage combo. And we made some ridiculous assumptions when we found a "max" of .448 - you clearly can't run 100% draft in the game, but we assumed we could. Yet real strats go higher! So clearly the 100% draft strat was missing something - and that was the BE needed to run high TG/Forts.
Think Different