"Objective enough" isn't the issue, rather it's how confident we are in the inferences. And yes, I would say that the new methods are preferable because 1) they

"Objective enough" isn't the issue, rather it's how confident we are in the inferences. And yes, I would say that the new methods are preferable because 1) they do a better job of explicitly quantifying and representing uncertainty 2) they use more sophisticated source data/features.