Thanks for writing this. It sounds like what I've experienced in this kind of work isn't just accidental. I am working on leveling up math skills to be able to understand the process for TensorFlow etc, but I get the feeling that once it's finally tractable I'll still have the same problems of finding how to transform the inputs into whatever works best for the model, what to output, and how to use the output. This seems to be the part that can't be solved by off-the-shelf packages. And the part where many or most exciting discoveries will be made in the future.