Yes, definitely agree. The project started as one thing, then turned into another, then another. I was only doing the coin grading for fun and wasn't planning on actually implementing it anywhere. So I switched gears and just focused on building a high resolution ResNet, regardless of what would be best for the actual coin grading.

There are probably better solutions, especially for this size of a dataset, and maybe a sliding window is necessary to achieve very high accuracy.

But I think this model can still be useful and preferable for some datasets of large images with fine patterns. Or at the very least preferred for simplicitys sake.