Doesn't this further prove my point? If you're saying that some tasks, like NLP, are too complex to tame and you should just throw more data at it, you're basically capitulating to complexity and taking the easier route. Isn't that the opposite of what researchers should be doing?

There's no shame in taking a non-optimal path, and then working out how to get better at it later. Research is about solving problems, answering questions. Why should that have to be the hard way?