Thank you, that's just the sort of breadcrumb I was looking for!

I'm in a bit of a rush and don't know the term for this offhand, but I remember hearing that single-layer neural networks are equivalent to multi-layer ones:

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/451127/equivalence...

https://www.quora.com/Is-a-single-layer-feed-forward-neural-...

There are probably more insights like this out there. These equivalences allow us to think in abstractions that get us above the minutia of fine-tuning these algorithms so that we can see the big picture. I think.