It depends how many hyperparameters there are. Many popular general-purpose ML algorithms have only a handful of numbers for hyperparameters, so they don't embody much human input. And they can sometimes be tuned automatically.
Also, an algorithms that can learn 100s of different games with the same hyperparameters is more highly regarded than one that needs different hyperparameters for each.
Related to the blog post: https://openai.com/blog/universe/