In reality, neither is really deficient, they're just aiming at different audiences which need different things.
I didn't mean to imply that tinkering was inferior to research - the whole premise was just to tease out how they're different, with different audiences, as you say. Interestingly, the discussion here has been dominated by people who think that I look down on them. People who've discussed it in other fora have not read the post that way.
The Show More links under his youtube MarI/O video link directly to the Stanley Miikkulainen NEAT paper.
and he links the wikipedia page on Neuroevolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution
which cites two [1][2] of your papers among others :
yet you say : " it is atrocious because of the complete lack of scholarship. The guy didn't even know he was reinventing the wheel, and didn't care to look it up. "
a bit harsh perhaps ? At least mentioning the foundational NEAT paper is not a complete lack of scholarship.
I feel you have overlooked that Seth does try and provide good citations to his audience and it would kind if you mentioned him by name in your article rather than " some guy "
He did inspire other twitch streamers to experiment with neuroevolution and neural nets and benchmark many SNES games.[3] although downstream this follow up does goes uncited by yourself.
[1] "Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.7326v3.pdf
[2] "Countering poisonous inputs with memetic neuroevolution" (PDF)https://www.academia.edu/download/30945872/poison.pdf
[3] Mario Bros mari/o https://clips.twitch.tv/CourteousEmpathicTruffleCeilingCat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRxUQNFxAWc Mari/o kart winterbunny
https://clips.twitch.tv/HilariousPolishedZucchiniHassanChop - mario kart RNN mariflow