Although I agree all the way, and also believe that these "expert systems" will all fail, I have seen another pattern as well.

Whenever I get real deep into almost any subject I tend to find the generations before boomers far superior, especially since I'm always interested in really knowing how something works, how it can be replicated with as base materials and/or principles as possible, and also how you'd develop the skills while recreating its whole.

A good example is when I bought my first boat in 98, beautiful, super classic racing yacht from maybe the mid to late 1920's. Picture the archetypical sailboat.

Well, the fore part of the keel was so rotten that after the first season I literally used two hammers to pull it out!

I spent most of the winter going through all the pieces, how the forces would be absorbed and spread by the joints that were involved, how I'd recreate it, as well as asking around.

Come spring I got a huuuuuge beam of oak from a sawmill, I even think they cut the tree down for my specific order. When they loaded it up on the roof of my 61 Ford Anglia it almost tipped over haha!

When I got it on water it was all watertight and well, and after a while I got the "exam result": from the way the paint creased around the planking of the hull as well as observing it directly it was plain to see that the forces were now not concentrated around the mast, but spread evenly through the hull as intended :-)

If I'd gotten deeper into wooden boats by now I would have recreated a lot of old knowledge and procedures, of course aided by the internet in major ways. But this was before the internet really, although I was online by then of course, it was still a process of doing everything hands on, extracting knowledge from many people, but still trusting my self and that there would be old, missing pieces that I knew was there from the beginning, but which were forgotten.

When it comes to getting real deep into fields in this way I've found that the internet is a huge help in terms of sort of re-extracting things that were forgotten.

Another example is when I was totally immersed in photography from around 89 to 94, I got so deep that I started mixing chemicals from their basic component, even making my own weight that I could calibrate down to ~1/100th of a gram.

This took me thousands of hours, then later when I ran a shared studio space right after the GFC I came across equally dedicated people who were able to learn more or less the same in months, not years. All because they could meet equally dedicated people in all sorts of forums online.

I haven't got too much experience with the current crop of wild eyed enthusiasts, maybe they're few and far between, but there will always be some who go for deep, real learning!

And many will discover the same: to really learn you have to go all the way back to the very creation of the field you choose to do a deep dive into :-)