It indeed would be much better. There’s a reason the old CV methods aren’t used much anymore.

If you want to anything even moderately complex, deep learning is the only game in town.

I’ve found exactly the opposite. In domain after domain the performance of a pure deep learning method is orders of magnitude less than that of either a traditional algorithm or a combination.

And often the CNNs are so finicky about noise or distortion that you need something as an input stage to clean up the data.