> by people who had no idea what they were doing.

I would personally hold this opinion of anyone still using genetic/evolutionary inspired algorithms for symbolic regression. There are multiple deterministic algorithms that do not have the same inherent drawbacks and are generally quite good.

Before I wrote my algo, and was trying to scale out GP, I hit the limits of RNG and had to go find some with seriously huge cycle properties. (howany calls before they reached the end and started over producing the same sequence)