"terrible engineering" - You've got to start somewhere to learn. As someone who has spent years as a hobby. If you care enough then you learn from. "This unscientific approach is why the ecosystem is flooded with overfitted, hollow checkpoints that break down outside of their strict test sets.You aren't advancing the frontier; you are just polluting the platform because you refuse to open a textbook." - Same goes to learn from. Partly projecting with this next part: Imagine gatekeeping ML out of elitism because people learn differently and have different goals. A public platform exists to share what we learn and discover so that others may advance with or separately.