I understand all your points, but they are just not satisfying. CNNs and RNNs are sufficiently different, I sort of see understand. Maybe CNNs are more like you

I understand all your points, but they are just not satisfying. CNNs and RNNs are sufficiently different, I sort of see understand. Maybe CNNs are more like your eyeball and RNNs are more like your inner brain. But LSTMs... really? There are so many variations of them and they seem to be such trial and error hooking nodes up in weird ways. I'm not saying they don't work, and I'm comfortable not know why particular weights do what they do, but I it's hard to get understand why some configurations work so much better than others for certain problems.