I think the point is to really get a handle on emergent phenomenon. Really, this ties into the parents musings on mathematical model of the mind. Really, I think your views are entirely compatible with the stated goal (which is vague for a reason). The entire point is I believe is to be able to describe this emergent behavior without having to invoke all the underlying lower level processes. For example, looking at pharmacology, perhaps one day we can actually have meaningful models of what a molecule will do, without 'brute forcing' every single possible interaction.

Which kind of ties into the parent's musings into the mathematical model of thought. The point is to create models that avoid invoking as much of the underlying low-level processes as possible. It would be -amazing- if we could create a mass of DEs that would -think-, especially if those DEs weren't just a straight representation of a massive neural network that happened to be copied right out of our brains.