Partially agree: yes we should endeavor to learn as much as possible about how these reasoning strategies work. It will pay dividends in enhancing and aligning the models.

But the stochastic game IS the win. That is exactly why they are able to find solutions is seemingly infinite solution spaces. Your symbolic techniques can only get you gains in narrow domains and by the time you figure out how to make it work for your niche domain, the next all-purpose LLM release will crush your results with stochastic games. (OK maybe over-exaggerating a bit here but these stochastic games over the language space is why we can pull together knowledge from many domains.)