I get a similar vibe from psychology. There's a number of "experts" that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours... And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can't be reproduced in a lab.

Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).

If you think LLMs are good at anything, I am almost 100% certain to disagree with you about pretty much everything, to help you understand this distinction.

Depends on what you mean by "anything." The current obsession in the tech world of trying to shove LLMs into the AGI box? Yeah, not a good fit. Pure language stuff like translation or brainstorming? Very useful. LLMs now even surpass DeepL.

why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?

I have a similar compulsion to clarify that my interest in LLMs centers mainly around local open-source models that can run on consumer hardware.