My pet project has been trying to use elixir with NEAT or HyperNEAT to try and make a spiking network, then when thats working decently drop some glial interactions I saw in a paper. It would be kinda bad at purely functional stuff, but idk seems fun. The biggest problems are time and having to do a lot of both the evolutionary stuff and the network stuff. But yeah the ubiquity of free datasets does make it easy to train.