[nerdponx]

Thanks for clarifying.

These tools do, however, have an important place in saving practitioners time and energy on the "knob-twiddling". It's a little like robot-assisted surgery: the robot doesn't actually do the surgery, but it makes the surgeon's job a whole lot easier.

[Jasamba]

That is making the assumption that the person using the tool is a surgeon (an expert in the field who could function independently if needed) which is not who the targeted demographic of such tools is. No-one who understands ML to some non-zero extent would use a plug-and-play ML tool, given that there is ML left to do otherwise. A better analogy would be a janitor activating the red button of the robot machine, which then does its complex surgery where if something goes wrong, the janitor would not be able to replace/understand the problem other than trying to restart it/kick it.

[nerdponx]

Perhaps, but the meta/hyper-optimization techniques used to implement TPOT, AutoML, etc. are perfectly valid replacements for grid search and stepwise feature selection.