Really? It's not one of my top picks, but I've always considered it to be fairly solid. It's like a little tiny Ghost Ship that poops out silvers!
Plus, you'd rank it worse than Chancellor?
I would - for one thing it's more expensive than chancellor. (It is, however, better than
Thief - please trash my coppers for me).
Ghost Ship provides card advantage. You play one card to draw two and force your opponent to discard two.
Bureaucrat does not. You pay your action and one card to force your opponent to have a four card hand rather than a five card hand next turn. You are trading card for card but it cost you four cash to buy and used up your action. And Bureaucrats can miss in the midgame.
As for pumping silvers into my deck, I don't
want many silvers in there. Silver is a neutral card - in order to buy a province I need an average card value of 1.6. Silver only has a card value of 2.0. I won't say that silver is the worst possible card that actually helps me in the end game (that would be
Pearl Diver), but unless you are flooding your deck with them (
tradering three
Ill Gotten Gains in one game springs to mind) they don't really help you get to the eight mark, merely provide a launch ramp to get the fives and sixes; if you have a silver in hand the average value of your other cards needs to be 1.5 rather than 1.6. The marginal gain of more than your first few silvers is trivial.
This means that going through the deck for the second or third time (i.e. turns 3-6 or for two plays) the bureaucrat noticably improves my deck. But that's two silvers it put in there. After that mor silver doesn't really matter that much. Between turns 7 and 10 or so (or another two plays of the bureaucrat) the odds of hitting a victory card are somewhere around 50% so I've probably missed with the bureaucrat once. I've spent one card and two precious actions to put in two more cards
that don't noticeably improve my deck. And that's assuming I don't get bureaucrat with another action card.
I'd rather spend the extra action on just being able to buy better cards. Of course I'd rather have a silver than
either bureaucrat or
chancellor (or, for that matter,
Woodcutter). Chancellor can easily get you to that second or third reshuffle early - as far as I know it's one of the very few ways you can draw a gold on turn 4 (the other being a 5:2 split for Royal Seal) - and if you're getting cloggy at the end it can be what the doctor ordered.
Note that the above doesn't apply in the case of
gardens,
feodum, or other random low-cost veep strategies like
Tunnel discards - but if there is a trash card on the table the Bureaucrat loses what little value it had - with the estates likely to be taken out there's nothing for it to hit and it becomes a seriously nerfed workshop (itself not a very good card) that cost four to buy.