Mathematicians are human just the same and are wont to get their hands on shiny toys too from time to time. There's some value in seeking out novelty.

Apropos deep nets, with the explosion in machine learning in the past few years, I've been seeing a lot of research interest statements change to meet that. In particular, there's an awful lot of numerical linear algebra being done now.

I suspect that things will come full-circle soon enough, and those tools developed in numerical linear algebra (via their connections to functional analysis) will make their way to harmonic analysis.

(This is notwithstanding the fact that compressed sensing is picking up a little momentum as a research area in applied mathematics and other disciplines that study signal processing. Wavelets, curvelets, shearlets, chirplets, etc. will likely see some action there too.)