In some of those cases, the active research has been going on for as long as deep learning itself- for instance, one-shot-learning comes from the '90s, if memory serves, so does transfer learning ('93, wikipedia says). My hunch is that in such cases only mediocre solutions exist.

And of course, just because there's reasearch in a given area doesn't mean that progress will necessarily be made. Frex, research on semantics has been going on since the dawn of AI and we 're not even close yet.

Personally, I think it's always good to have people pointing out limitations of a technique. Minsky and Papert caused a lot of consternation back in Perceptrons, but without that, who knows when the ANN researchers would have gotten off their butts and tried to solve real problems.