Thanks for your comments David. I partly agree, but there has also been… 1) inertia in the face of the dramatic regime change regarding available investment information, and the tech to deal with it (ie ML); 2) a fear of style drift, as many quants (specifically) have intricately tied themselves to linear factor based investing, a fundamentally different approach to most ML.
(Separately, see our Nov 2021 JFDS paper linked above for more on the relative advantages of interpretable-AI vs factor based investing.)