Path 1 — Manual feature engineering: It can only capture what you think to encode — you miss the multi-hop relational patterns that drive real prediction accuracy. Weeks of work per model, and you still leave signal on the table.
Path 2 — LLMs on tabular data: They tokenize tables as text, destroying the relational structure that matters most. No concept of primary keys, foreign keys, or the join paths that encode the most predictive patterns.
KumoRFM learns directly on relational databases, capturing patterns across joins that no amount of feature engineering can replicate. It operates on your schema as a graph — discovering multi-hop features automatically that you'd never encode by hand.