Hunting Party is pretty clearly the second-best non-attack $5 [...] And it's entirely outclassed by wharf, pretty much all around.
Hunting Party + Terminal Silver? You need something like baron or monument to make it worth it.
Doesn't work with:
Hunting Party
[...]
(It's not really that ^^these things are really actively bad, just they don't really help, at least not nearly to the extent they normally do)
I think I disagree about Hunting Party being normally outclassed by Wharf.
Sure, Wharves will usually beat Hunting Party + terminal Silver as you say. But the thing is, on a board with Hunting Party and Wharf, there is a very strong terminal addition for your Hunting Party stack: Wharf itself! Or to be more exact, two Warves to enable you to play one every turn.
I think in the absence of villages (and also absent cursers, Throne Room, Governor and Goons off the top of my head), my first $5/6 buys would be in this order:
Wharf - Gold - 3-4 Hunting Parties - Wharf - as many Hunting Parties as I can get before I need to go green.
(I would expect the one early Gold to help a lot to make good use of the 2nd Wharf buy, be it for Hunting Party+Silver initially or two $5s after that.)
I haven't simulated it though. I just wanted to do so but realized that it is quite complicated because you have to make multiple rules to tell the bot how to use multiple buys. For instance, if you get $10 with two buys in the mid-game, the usual rule to buy a Province as a first priority would do that and waste the two additional $2. With Hunting Party and Wharf on the board, though it would definitely be stronger to buy two of them.
Did you (or someone else) already do that work and program sensible rules to simulate it?
I don't feel like doing it myself now. But unless you can prove me wrong with hard numbers, I think I am going to stand by my intuition that Hunting Parties plus 2 Wharves should get a higher winning probability than going all Wharf (and no Hunting Party) out of most boards.