The thing that qualifies as "faffing" in my opinion isn't the statistical NLP programs, which "are what they are" but claims of progress based primarily on benc

The thing that qualifies as "faffing" in my opinion isn't the statistical NLP programs, which "are what they are" but claims of progress based primarily on benchmarks, as YeGoblynQueene rightly states. And "limited domain" is relative. A program that gets many aspects of language right talking about a small world might be said to have a larger domain than a program that outputs stream of semi-plausible, semi-gibberish involving the whole of English language. Which again isn't saying modern NLP is nothing but rather we should a somewhat better to talk of it (and machine learning generally) than "hitting benchmarks".