Tangential rant: I worked in a computer vision lab around the time ML/neural network was on the rise in the area. The chief scientist there was seriously annoyed by such papers because he got into the field to understand at a deep level what vision is. Neural networks get the job done, but after successfully implementing a neural network you haven't learned as much about how you can infer information about the world out there from images of it, as you do from first principles thinking.