Hell, you can (efficiently) solve a lot of problems with KNN that people are throwing dedicated hardware + Tensorflow. But that's not cool. I've learned that doing the "cool stuff" in the face of practicality is rampant because it's part of the self-fulfilling cycle of hiring people who do the cool stuff and people doing the cool stuff to get hired.

There's a whole world beyond neural networks and it seems like it's mostly all on the backburner now. Which I understand, the resurgence in NN algorithms, approaches and hardware in the last 10 years has been exciting but it does feel like tunnel vision sometimes.