HN madlibs:
I'm in the camp that thinks we're headed in a perpendicular direction and won't ever achieve powered flight with current efforts based on the simple idea that the basic tooling is wrong from first principles. I mean, most of the "progress" in flight has been due to getting better and learning how to understand a single piece of technology: fixed wing aircraft.
A lot of recent powered flight findings have shown that real birds _don't_ just use fixed wings; in fact, they flap their wings! Until we start thinking from the ground up how to build and engineer systems that reflect the bird wing, we're essentially wandering around in the dark with perhaps only a piece of what we _think_ is needed for powered flight. (I'm not saying the bird wing is the best engineered thing for powered flight either, but I'm saying it's one of the best examples we have to model powered flight after and that notion has largely been ignored)
I generally think it's hubris to spit in the face of 4 billion years of evolution thinking that some crafty fixed wing aircraft with X number more wingspan and horsepower will emerge magically as truly capable of powered flight - it will be a strange abomination at best.
to be slightly less piquant:
A) Machine learning hasn't been focused on simple neural nets for quite some time.
B) There's no reason to believe that the organizational patterns that produce one general intelligence are the only ones capable of doing that. In fact it's almost certainly not the case.
By slowly iterating and using the best work and discarding the rest, we're essentially hyper-evolving our technology in the same way that natural selection does. It seems inevitable that we'll arrive at least at a convergent evolution of general intelligence, in a tiny fraction of the time it took on the first go-around!