I kind of disagree with this. I think there are huge needs for "better language" kinds of improvements with ML that gives insight into how various pieces in a p

I kind of disagree with this. I think there are huge needs for "better language" kinds of improvements with ML that gives insight into how various pieces in a pipeline get combined, how tuning happens, how feature generation relates to input data. I don't consider ML to be terrifically repeatable today due to a lot of non-standard low-level tweaking that goes on at the top levels of work there. I think it's definitely moving, but I don't think it's nearly as mechanized as, say, AES is, given that the tradeoffs one needs to balance are significantly more complex. You can't just Machine Learn something as much as people may try.