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> the answer is always along the lines of "just try a load of stuff and pick the one that works best"

Forgive the naive question, but why couldn't ML figure out its own best "stuff"?

Because then you've got to figure out how to tell the machine what best means and that's what you were setting out to do in the first place.

This is pretty much what boosting is. Although we can ask the same question of the boosting algorithm, I guess.