Help for a NOAA connectionist "primer"

mike,
	thanks for the input - it seems a cogent summary of the (many) 
responses I've been getting. However, it seems just about noone has really
attempted a one-to-one sort of comparison using traditional pattern
recognition benchmarks. Just about everything I hear and read is 
anecdotal.

Would it be fair to say that "neural nets" are more accessible, simply
because there is such a plethora of 'sexy' user-friendly packages for sale?
Or is back-prop (for example) truly a more flexible and widely-applicable
algorithm than other statistical methods with uglier-sounding names?

If not, it seems to me that most connectionists should be having a bit
of a mid-life crisis about now.

rich