You are probably right. Neural doohickeys find real uses in computational chemistry. Accurate ab initio solvers (many-body Schrödinger equation) are very slow

You are probably right. Neural doohickeys find real uses in computational chemistry. Accurate ab initio solvers (many-body Schrödinger equation) are very slow and everything else is just heuristic-, quasi- approximation mixed with semi-empirical tricks. When someone makes even marginally better heuristic improvement, it's more likely that they sell it or start a company than post paper in arxiv. There is serious money to be made.