[kbenson]

I think the real question is, which is more cost/time efficient:

a) Hire someone or a company skilled enough to whip up some classifier that can count these from some accuracy, level, which entails paying a developer, and probably 5-10 graduate students to sit around and count dandelion bristles on a good number of dandelion seeds to create a training set.

or

b) Just have 5-10 graduate students sit around and count dandelion bristles on a good number of dandelion seeds

Given that a is a super set of b, and the extra portions of a are likely much more expensive than all of b, I think the answer is fairly clear...