Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you try any other ML algorithms on your data before using neural nets? I know neural nets are getting trendy again but a simple SVM or a linear classifier can provide very good performance.
We did, but they didn't work quite as well. But that could absolutely be my lack of experience with how best to normalize and format the input vectors. In the end, NNs seemed less "fussy", if that makes any sense.
Have you thought about crowdsourcing the human training portion?