But like how often are you gonna do this in general? Why does dev time or effort really matter here when either way you are building something to just, you know, actually use going forward? Its not like one needs to build a new classifier everyday.
On top, most EMs wouldn’t take a risk on an exploration of something “unknown” (to them) and couldn’t get buy-in from a PM.
I say this as an EM. Interview hundreds of people and, while, yes, some people don’t interview well, you might be shocked at the level of creative thinking. Even when “creative” is narrowly scoped to “this is a solved problem in a related domain.
It's more likely the product is focused on something else, but a classification model could come in handy...