[dave_sullivan]

The problem with using intuition for feature engineering is that intuition is often wrong. But more than that, it's much less scalable than a system that learns progressively higher level features from lower level data automatically.

And parameter selection isn't nearly as involved in practice--but it is important to know what you're doing because you'll basically be translating from papers to code in order to get a working implementation, at least until some startup comes out with a plug and play deep learning paas

For anyone interested in playing with the tools that are available, deeplearning.net provides a set of very good tutorials with working code.