Despite the deep insight we were able to gain into the synthesis system of ZIF-8, the current study also identified significant challenges associated with developing a true "synthetic oracle" for predicting the ideal synthesis parameters for any given material. While we were able to identify and extract information about the synthesis, we were unable to reliably connect the quality of the material produced to the methods themselves (e.g. by identifying specific yield or surface area). A crucial next step is therefore to adopt state of the art transformer-based methods e.g. BERT or GPT-4 to better interpret the entire research article as a single unit and therefore identify implicitly described synthesis protocols (e.g. tabulated changes to individual synthesis parameters). A second challenge lies in the estimating the viability of synthesis parameters extracted during text mining or proposed by generative models, preventing automated reproduction of a synthesis protocol without human oversight and validation. Finally, as has been discussed elsewhere, the synthesis protocol extraction methods developed here can only build from published information, which is biased towards the most successful synthesis methods only. More comprehensive reporting of synthesis information using structured formats akin to the crystallographic information file format would enable far more wide-reaching analysis to be performed.