Comment by usgroup

I think the skill-level required to start grinding boosted trees is relatively low compared to NNs. There's lots you can do without special hardware. Its more democratic. It trains very quickly compared to NNs. It works for big and small data. The implementations are very fancy at this stage. You can customise loss, splits, the base algorithm. Inference is fast. And so on. Boosted trees have a lot going for them in the black box model space.