Your simulated environment needs to accurately represent everything you're simulating for RL to be useful, otherwise, it will simply find artifacts of flaws of the sim itself or may fail to discover n-th order effects since they won't ever occur. This is exactly where DNNs have excelled and is most desired to be used: in all the places we don't know the foundational theory to. That may be why they're so successful compared to our traditional reductionist approaches: they might catch all the non-reduced aspects we never add into sims as we know them. We don't need DNNs doing QED or Newtonian mechanics (in general), we have nice solutions to these that in many (not all) cases are pretty darn efficient.
In some cases, you could be computationally bound and never achieve a sim representing your desired environment. In many, you lack theory to correctly build a sim. You need RL building the sims that you plan to use RL to explore optimal processes you seek within. We have a few disciplines that are well formulated enough where sims can be useful in but the vast majority are simply going to give you garbage or are just computationally bound. At best, many sims provide guidance that experts need to interpret.
In some cases, you could be computationally bound and never achieve a sim representing your desired environment. In many, you lack theory to correctly build a sim. You need RL building the sims that you plan to use RL to explore optimal processes you seek within. We have a few disciplines that are well formulated enough where sims can be useful in but the vast majority are simply going to give you garbage or are just computationally bound. At best, many sims provide guidance that experts need to interpret.