Qualitative and quantitative analyses aren't that different, fundamentally.

Quantitative emphasizes getting measurable results.

Qualitative emphasizes getting deep results.

In practice it's expensive to get both, so which methodology you emphasize leads to what results you get.

Quantitative: measurable but shallow, surface level summary statistics.

Qualitative: deep but narrow.

But now LLMs can do mediocre (but robustly mediocre) human-ish analysis of non-numerical data.

So you can get qualitative style depth with quantitative level measurability.

When the fundamental cost structures of things change, it messes with our intuition of what's possible.

All of a sudden things we just implicitly assumed were fundamentally impossible become, surprisingly, possible.

It will look like magic.