The developers' plan is actually pretty smart:
Players are MUCH better at breaking the game mechanics wise and coming up with good strats.
Consequently their plan from the beginning has been to use pretty crappy AI at the beginning, figure out the human strategies and the game imbalances, balance out the game, and then hard code in actual strats for the AI like in chess. One of the reasons the AI is so good at chess is because of the centuries of development humans made in chess. An AI built by chess players in the 17th century probably wouldn't be very good even if they could program back then.
Unfortunately we're currently in the "crappy AI" phase of development.