I think AlphaGo vs AlphaZero is a strong argument against this. AlphaGo used the best knowledge of humanity to try to tune its play and mix human expertise, and

I think AlphaGo vs AlphaZero is a strong argument against this. AlphaGo used the best knowledge of humanity to try to tune its play and mix human expertise, and centuries of master level play, with the strength of deep learning systems. It seems like this would be ideal, particularly as per your analogy. Google certainly believed this as this is the system they directed their resources towards developing and then very publicly demonstrating. AlphaZero was likely a curious aside at one point. The idea with AlphaZero is to throw everything out the window. Even the game itself is just generalized into a generic position->transition->terminal state system where most 'simple' (in terms of rules) games can be relatively easy replaced. There was no human heuristics, no human games to go from instead relying entirely on self training, and so on. Of course it ended up that AlphaZero became vastly stronger vastly faster than AlphaGo ever managed to.