"The reason this isn't the accepted ideal method for building an AI is that it -doesn't build an AI-."

You started off with a promising first sentence, then fell into a philosophical debate that people couldn't resist getting trapped in.

So, more to the point, what this does build is nothing more and nothing less than a uselessly complicated software system. It's all fun and games at first, but then the heuristics start interacting in weird ways, then they start interacting in really weird ways, and you start stacking heuristics on top of heuristics for applying heuristics, and before long you have a system that demonstrates rare flashes of brilliance but in practice is so unpredictable and opaque you can't use it.

You end up with demo-ware.