tC: Consider the following. I'm playing engine and building to $22 coin per turn. I get my engine up to something reliable and have $7 and 2 coin.
Imagine I spend that on Bazaar and Embargo (turn 1). That gets me directly to $10 where I can buy two $5 components the next turn (say Bazaar and Rabble on turn 2).
Now imagine I spend that on Bazaar and Squire (turn 1). Next turn I trash the Squire. I can now buy a $6 (like Hunting Grounds or Altar) and pick up a Rabble. In this case, Squire has acted like the functional equivalent of a one-shot gold on turn 2.
But what if I don't want the attack (e.g. Torturer against a Tunnel opponent)? Well if I have:
1. Scaling Tfb I'm using.
2. A reliable enough engine.
3. Enough spare action balance.
Then we can imagine the following as out baseline: Turn 1 buy $5 (like Bazaar) & Estate (and yes this can be the best thing to do). Turn 2 Salvage the Estate, now we can buy two $5 (say Bazaar/Merchant ship). Turn 3 - we have $9 to spend ($2 coin from new Bazaars and $2 from Mship), buy a 5/4.
What happens when we use Squire instead? Turn 1 - buy Bazaar/Squire. Turn 2 Salvage the squire (by Bazaar/Mship), gain Torturer. Turn 3 Salvage the Torturer now we have $14 to spend.
But is Salvager a special type of scaling TfB? No. We can do the same thing with Expand. With the estate we can turn it into a $5 (say a bazaar) on T2. We still have $8 to spend so we could get another $5 (Mship) and buy a silver. On T3 then we can Expand the Silver to a $6, and have $9 to spend. We can then gain up $15 worth of cards on T3 with reasonable restrictions.
Expanding the Squire also gives us a Bazaar and we can buy Mship/Silver. However on T3 we can expand the attack up to $8 and have $11 to spend on cards.
Okay so that is baseline.
What happens if I just give you a spoils on T1 and we don't have scaling TfB?
T1: $10, buy Bazaar/Mship.
T2: $10, buy Bazaar/Mship.
T3: $13 to spend
Now obviously, it takes a good engine to get this sort of thing going, but one way to look at is that it gives you a one-shot gold delayed by a turn. The fact that it is useful of its own right in engines (if you fail to line it up with your scaling TfB) is pure gravy.
Doing so, you spent 2$, an additional turn, two uses of a 5$-cost and two slots (Squire, Sab) to gain a 3$-card and a 6$-card. That's not so bad, but it is definitely not what a one-shot-gold does, I mean we are talking about something similar to spoils, aren't we?
And I can't see any striking similarity between squire and spoils.
Oh come on, if I had a Spoils in hand I'd have picked up an Upgrade and Upgraded it into a Hunting Grounds/Gold. Squire was better than that in this instance.
The net effect, if your engine can support it, of buying Squire to trash and then feeding the attack to your scaling TfB is very often
at least a one-shot gold a turn delayed, sometimes it is one-shot Plat in terms of how quickly it ramps up your card acquisition power. Sure it isn't precisely the same as Spoils, but then Chancellor isn't the same as a Silver for a lot of cases. Playing a Chancellor has around the same net effect of playing a Silver; using scaling TfB on a Squire can have around the same net effect of getting a free Spoils.