> Trying to do the same with a data-driven model is a hard sell

Ex-physicst here. JumpCrisscross is absolutely right. It's a hard sell and it should be. Saying "I want a better machine but I don't know what I'm looking for" is only worse than "I want to put objects together but I don't know what machine I'm building."

The space of what's concievably possible is too large to explore if you're not guided by an hypothesis, even if you didn't have money constraints. It's not a human problem, reality is just complex.