In my experience, if you are "stepping around more or less blindly" then the problem & EA have not been properly formulated. In general of course, if a gradient is available then gradient descent will do a better job >99% of the time.

Though with a bit of domain knowledge, and/or some careful design of the objective function(s), variation operators etc., an EA can be a pretty efficient explorer of the space. It's nichely-applicable, but when done properly it's far from blind.

For the purpose of designing something more akin to biology, does anyone know why there is no consideration of spiking neural networks (SNNs) in this proposal? Is it just that they are far less practical to implement than the Forward-Forward algorithm (and thus less attractive)? My understanding was that SNNs are more biologically realistic, but maybe not enough to be pursued.