The art of blowing up protein

I apologise, but I could not resist this rant...
I am a big advocate for big data —also it's my job—, however one trend I find disturbing is the frequency of attempts to make automated pipelines to predict how one could make a given compound: in a large amount of cases, doing some reading up is way more efficient. Not to mention, without bugs.


I understand organic chemistry and I pride myself in understanding bacterial metabolic logic (trends and tricks employed by metabolism) and if I am shown a compound I will give a good guess on a cell would make it even if nobody as ever studied it. Given a compound I would read up as much as I could and generally there is a missing enzyme or there is someone wrong with the literature, so an observant eye is needed. It is a task that needs knowledge and intuition. It does not take long really and is mighty fun.
Therefore I am utterly lost when it comes to understanding the utility of tools that propose to munge data from a bunch of databases in an attempt to gain the same conclusion.
For sugars or alcohols with many links to central metabolism where there is a complex interplay of fluxes, I see how they could be useful. But they seem to be sold to tackle a molecule that finds itself at the end of a long pathway, which may have one or two variants along the way —which is probably beautifully described in MetaCyc. When used these tools (there are many) will either use a reaction backwards or fall pray to an annotation error —I tried one where I asked it how one could biosynthesise a cofactor and the quickest pathway was a reaction that as a product had this cofactor, but not as a substrate.
The non-model organism argument does not really hold up either. A well curated genome is essential and regardless of what the automated pipelines promise an expert hand is needed, so it would make no sense if the human expert forgot his/her biochemistry at milestone completion.
The major thing that baffles me is that of all tasks in planning the engineering of a pathway reading papers and doodling chemical structures is by far the most pleasant, so why would anyone want to farm it off to an incompetent computer is beyond me...