Deep learning is glamorous and highly rewarded. If you train and evaluate a Transformer (a state-of-the-art language model) on a dataset of 22 million enzymes and then use it to predict the function of 450 unknown enzymes, you can publish your results in Nature (a very well-regarded publication). Your paper will be viewed 22,000 times and will be in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric (a rating of how much attention online articles receive). However, if you do the painstaking ...