Same here. I too enjoy writing functional code more than I do training neural networks. Most of the classes focus on the training part, but most of the work in practice is running people down to give you data, and cleaning it.

Even sharing datasets is difficult, and I recently wrote a bit about it. https://blog.helmspoint.com/posts/2017/09/05/sharing-machine...

But that doesn't even cover versioning, licensing, permanence, and provenance. The tools available for machine learning training is still nascent, so the experience isn't great.