Deep Learning frees you from the need to do "feature engineering" and usually works much better than methods which require such process. I'd instead recommend everyone to "dive deep" into deep learning and once they master it, get acquainted with classical methods that still might get used here and there. I understand it's difficult to let go of what you worked very hard to understand when you were studying ML, but such is life, "sunk cost fallacy" should not you blind from seeing 95% success rate of DL while observing paltry 60% success rate with SVM/HMM on the same problem. Just let it go.