[blagie]

I doubt it. A lot of this is like voodoo and throwing darts at a board.

Some people developed some intuition for it, but it's, well, random. We're evolving big things we don't really understand, and for reasons we don't really understand, some things evolve better than others. At some point, people starting getting feelings in their gut that some "architectures" worked better for vision than NLP, and things diverged. There continues to be queasy-gut intuition, but when you read all the papers, if you cut through all the hairy math language, it's a lot of voodoo and throwing darts at a board.

I think it's much more the same problem you'd have at any shop, where the smartest people want to work for FAANG / sexy startups / elite universities, etc., and the bottom end of the market just wants a job, and lands with lower-tier employers. Talent naturally consolidates. At the same time, org culture, strategy, and leadership can have a huge impact too.