I disagree -- I think if you can nail down better what's happening and why and get a thorough handling on the mechanics, its limitations, its costs, etc you open the door to a) major efficiency wins b) improvements in rigor of said reasoning?

Right now we're playing a stochastic game with the weights, and getting major incremental improvements. But if we have a more formal modeling of how reasoning happens in them (whether we can even call it, that) we can potentially apply optimizations, adaptations of existing symbolic AI techniques, etc. to substantially shrink/optimize the models or make the inference process more efficient and more reliable.