You're probably not wrong, because what you're saying seems to be conventional wisdom.
However, there's a part of me that can't help thinking, "...but that's only because we're not used to thinking of our problems in terms of rules and constraints. If we got into the habit of doing it, we'd soon find out that more and more of our problems are of the rules-and-constraints kind, if only looked at the right way."
There's also an argument that you can turn any problem into rules and constraints, but doing so might not help you. I'm taking the stance here that maybe for a larger class of problems than we think it is actually helpful to think of them as rules and constraints. And then it's a small step to apply a generic solver as the first, baseline approach.
So my argument is not really that "we should apply solvers wherever they are currently immediately obviously useful" but more that "there might be a high-potential paradigm shift hidden here where we as a profession can adapt a new way of thinking based on off-the-shelf solvers for generic problems, if only we learn to view the world that way, and this might turn out to be a better way to think of the lower level components of software engineering."
However, there's a part of me that can't help thinking, "...but that's only because we're not used to thinking of our problems in terms of rules and constraints. If we got into the habit of doing it, we'd soon find out that more and more of our problems are of the rules-and-constraints kind, if only looked at the right way."
There's also an argument that you can turn any problem into rules and constraints, but doing so might not help you. I'm taking the stance here that maybe for a larger class of problems than we think it is actually helpful to think of them as rules and constraints. And then it's a small step to apply a generic solver as the first, baseline approach.
So my argument is not really that "we should apply solvers wherever they are currently immediately obviously useful" but more that "there might be a high-potential paradigm shift hidden here where we as a profession can adapt a new way of thinking based on off-the-shelf solvers for generic problems, if only we learn to view the world that way, and this might turn out to be a better way to think of the lower level components of software engineering."