sure. in the limit, everything is parameter tuning. with large enough NP-hard problems, the complexity of the search space is big enough that its infeasible to get to a better state by just tuning params in any reasonable amount of time.

I beg to disagree. Integer programming solvers have improved orders of magnitude in the past 20 years. The basic algorithm (branch and bound) is the same.

The big commercial solvers basically are very good at picking up structures and selecting the tuning parameters that work better for specific problem types.