All that's really happening there is a brute-force search for engineered features. Such brute-forcing has a very very low ROI when the necessarily huge datas

All that's really happening there is a brute-force search for engineered features. Such brute-forcing has a very very low ROI when the necessarily huge datasets don't already exist. Indeed, creating the experimental conditions to collect that data often means engaging in some form of imagined feature engineering.