Excellent post; this is a very astute point. It seems that so often some algorithm is optimized in a microcosm, but would just never hold up in practice. This

Excellent post; this is a very astute point. It seems that so often some algorithm is optimized in a microcosm, but would just never hold up in practice. This sort of optimization would almost certainly have more overhead than it would be worth. The real question is whether or not we can take these 150+ rules and distill from them some heuristics which perform better than our current protocols in practice. Perhaps these findings could inform future optimizations, but are not likely to be viable in and of themselves. Whether we'd need human eyes to look over these rules and distill them or if a machine could still generate them is a question for people much smarter than I.