This is so true. Random forest should be the default choice for most problem sets.

Now we have The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Random Forests and The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks. We just need The Unreasonable Effectiveness of XGBoost (for winning Kaggle competitions) and we'll have the whole set.

[1] http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/