This is a good observation. My personal opinion is that using many smaller networks as components of a larger, manually engineered system could be a fruitful ap

This is a good observation. My personal opinion is that using many smaller networks as components of a larger, manually engineered system could be a fruitful approach for these complex problems. End-to-end deep learning is the holy grail -- and may ultimately happen -- but I don't think computation in silicon semiconductors is going to cut it, and we don't yet know what the next computational substrate will be. Did you use a smallish convolutional model for extracting pole position, orientation, and radius from image data, or another approach?