Why is that tragic? Classic NLP tasks are IMHO kinda pointless. Nobody _actually_ cares about parse trees, etc. These things were useful when that was the best we could do with ML, because they allowed us to accomplish genuinely-useful NLP tasks by writing code that uses things like parse trees, NER, etc. But why bother with parse trees and junk like that if you can just get the model to answer the question you actually care about?