This will probably be hard to read and understand if you haven't played Viticulture and Agricola. They are very popular, so many people have videos explaining both games. I mostly want to talk about what I like about them, and not if they are good or not. Both are excellent, but very different in implementation.

I don't own many "worker placement" games, nor do I plan to acquire many more. This probably has to do with how I think about the two mechanics that generally define the genre: action spaces, and turn order management. I'm going to talk about Viticulture's take on these mechanics, obviously, but I also want to compare it to Agricola, the other worker placement game I've played a decent amount of (although it has been years since I last played Agricola).

Viticulture's worker mechanic works a little different than Agricola's, as well as other games that I have not played, but know a little bit about via various YouTubers and episodes of TableTop. A common occurrence in worker placement games is worker management. You generally start with half or slightly less than the maximum number of workers available to you, and through specific game actions, you can train additional workers, in order to take more actions for the rest of the game. Spending the early game training extra workers ensures allows you to just do more than opponents. Too few workers may result in just getting overwhelmed by a superior economy.

Training new workers is generally a costly action, though. A common drawback is "feeding workers". In Agricola, every time you go to harvest your farm, you also have to feed your family of workers. Many other game systems are wrapped around feeding. Your farm in Agricola has crops and animals, and if you build ovens and fancier ovens, you can leverage them to feed your family more efficiently. Scoring is dependent on amassing a lot of stuff, so being able to use as little as possible to feed helps bump up your score. Failing to feed brings a massive penalty. You also need a bigger house to allow for more workers, which can be very expensive if you build improvements in a bad order.

Viticulture's worker mechanic is far simpler. First of all, they have no sort of tax associated with them, such as Agricola's feeding. You simply pay the cost to train one, and it is yours for the rest of the game. Money management is very dynamic in Viticulture; having a large pile of money does not do much. In fact, having large piles of anything is not always lucrative. Viticulture is more of a race to the finish, compared to many other Euro games which often have a set number of rounds and emphasize maximizing your score in the meantime. Having a set number of rounds means you cannot surprise somebody and end the game earlier than they anticipated, which is a feature of games I've grown to appreciate, since it also comes with the ability to prolong a game by playing defensively.

I don't think I prefer one worker system over another, but Viticulture's is much easier to integrate into other game systems, since it is almost independent of every other system.

Action spaces in Viticulture are much more static than Agricola's. Viticulture's board actually has multiple spaces for workers to be placed for each type of action, making it very hard to block people from doing what they want. It also does not slowly grow over time. Agricola (and other games I presume) starts with basic actions, and over time, more and more actions are added to the board, allowing more diverse choices. Generally this makes the early game very crowded, since none of the spaces are redundant. Viticulture never really gets more or less crowded.

All worker placement games I'm aware of have boards that have scarce space for workers to go. If you go train a worker, that generally means that your opponent is going to have to go without taking that action. Think of a grocery store with only one of every item - you should probably wake up early to get what you actually want. In board games, that means being the first player to act in a round. I REALLY enjoy Viticulture's implementation of turn order. The "Wake Up Chart" is filled with nice bonuses of your choice, everything from extra cash, extra cards, or even extra victory points can be had. Greater rewards have the downside of putting your farther down in turn order, which means you may not get to do what needs to be done that round. Every game I've played has been close, and turn order management was a big part of that. Being first in the rounds that everyone is trying to trade in all of their cards for points is extremely important.

I've come to really enjoy dynamic turn order in games. It is surprisingly flexible in its applications. Splotter Spellen publishes games that generally tie turn order to prosperity. Viticulture and other worker placement games tie it to opportunity cost. If you are in no hurry to do a specific action, you can take a more powerful bonus. One challenge Viticulture's turn order system has is the first player token. Having the first player token means you place your pawn on the Wake Up Chart first (the thing that actually determines turn order). Every round, the first player token passes to another player. This can lead to uncontrollable situations where you have no chance to ever get a good place in turn order. For example, if you need to cash resources in for points next round, but you have the first player token in the current round, that means you will place your pawn on the Wake Up Chart last in the next round. Of course, this can be circumvented with a lot of preparation, but that can be an uphill battle for some people.

(The Tuscany expansion has a slightly different turn order mechanic, but as I have not played with that board yet, I won't talk about it)

As a final note, I never thought I would be so impressed by a generic looking piece as I am by the grape/wine token beads. They are a masterful piece in so many ways. They are transparent, so you can still read the number they are covering up, while even magnifying it a little due to being round on the top. Being rounded on the top also means that you cannot stack them, which helps teach players that you cannot have multiple wines and grapes of the same value. Even if they tried, the beads would give them a hell of a time representing it on their player board. Since one side is flat and the other is rounded, they don't seem to roll all that well, which means that as long as they don't bounce along the floor, they shouldn't fall underneath furniture or other annoying places.