Your insight on neural networks and historical data is on-point. I've watched a video wherein they tried to train an AI to trade and hopefully profit off of the bot. Turns out, using historical data on highly volatile markets as a reference for the bot will only end up in shambles, as it will always try to find and match certain patterns that it has recognized on the historical data and try to correlate it with the present, which for the most part does not really makes sense. I'm amazed with how trading bot creators, especially those which are mostly profitable, create their bots in such a way that it will ignore past trends and try to make sense of what's in front of it. I'm a coder myself but I'm on the lighter side of coding and I only do it for fun. If I were given a chance to study again, perhaps it will be AIs, machine learning, neural networks, and the deeper side of comsci just to try and 'understand' how you guys do it.
IMO you shouldn't be amazed at all, most of the retail bots are pure garbage. They are just a bunch of ifs and else statements that utilize the same ol' useless Indicators and shipped as AI. The issue is these "bots" are merely "tuned" to the "most profitable" settings they have found through brute forcing through historical data. If MACD does this and RSI does this and the 50 MA crosses this and the next candle is bullish trigger buys. The issue is everyone looks at the market through a certain lens which is through indicators if you are a neophyte and through volume profiles/Delta and VWAPs on the "Professional" side of things. The biggest issue is that both of these lenses are broken in themselves.
So no matter how good of a programmer you are, you are going to have to write or train your model with what this lens tells you. The only real advantage a bot will have over a human, in this case, would be of ability to run round the clock, it will be able to execute more trades than a human but won't change the outcome in the long run, if the lens is busted. What this industry needs is a new lens / a new perspective which will be able to counter what everyone else is doing. Wyckoff referred to it as the composite man/Operator. If you ask me personally I believe it is the case, the Composite man is the FED (Central Banks). People are made to believe that they can push the price around of their respective currencies by buying and selling while the commodity they are trading isn't owned by them. The currencies are the commodities of the Central Banks, they can set the price to whatever level they want. Just like Apple sets the price of iPhones, the Central bank can set the price of their product to whatever level they like. IMO whoever can track their footprints can beat the market.