The point of the bitter lesson is "leverage compute as best you can" not "use DNNs everywhere just because". Oftentimes your available compute is still a crappy

The point of the bitter lesson is "leverage compute as best you can" not "use DNNs everywhere just because". Oftentimes your available compute is still a crappy ARM machine with no real parallel compute where the best DNN you can run is still not large nor fast enough to even be viable, much less a good fit. And well some classical algorithms like A* are mathematically optimal. You literally cannot train a more efficient DNN if your problem needs grid search. It will just waste more compute for the same result. Besides, the nav stack is not really the point of ROS. It's the standardization. Standard IPC, types, messages, package building, deployment, etc. Interoperability where you can grab literally any sensor or actuator known to man and a driver will already exist and output/require the data in the exact format you need/have, standard visualizers and controllers to plug into the mix and debug. This is something we'll need as long as new hardware keeps getting built even if the rest of your process is end to end. It doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to work and it needs to be widely used for the concept to make sense.