If we eliminated step 2 and achieved equivalency with or even slightly improved upon the state of the art, we would still be at a significant disadvantage.

The problem is that the current best (publicly known) results are nowhere near good enough not to be verified by a human prior to deployment. So if we get to _that_ point having skipped step 2, the verification will have to be done on machine language.

And since there's no human-abstracted code intermediate between the spoken language and the assembly, the algorithmically-searched-out analogies of language to purpose are fairly likely to baffle everyone.