I was thinking of cortical area V1:
In my opinion it is the system that starts off only able to detect two angles of motion that becomes “pretty useless for deep analysis”. Having to make adjustments adds another step to the process. It makes more sense to me to start off with the brain’s center-surround receptive field organization.
Are you sure they are similar? Because I haven’t seen any. Do you have a reference?
I’m going by the results of hundreds of great sounding ideas I tried including ones that parallel what you proposed, and did not work as well as expected. From my experience successfully reproducing what is found in neuroscientific literature results in discovering a trick that can be modeled with a small amount of code. For example two frame place avoidance behavior and getting from place to place without bumping into anything unless still learning to walk/run/fly or were startled:
Neuroscience requires answering questions like: where would the brainwaves be represented?
How would you even model this kind of behavior without first modeling waves?