Diagnosing and screening for diabetic retinopathy is a well-known issue in the biomedical field. A component of computer-aided diagnosis that has advanced significantly over the past few years as a result of the development and effectiveness of deep learning is the use of medical imagery from a patient’s eye to identify the damage caused to blood vessels. Issues with unbalanced datasets, incorrect annotations, a lack of sample images, and improper performance evaluation measures have negatively impacted the performance of deep learning models. Using three benchmark datasets of diabetic retinopathy, we conducted a detailed comparison study comparing various state-of-the-art approaches to address the effect caused by class imbalance, with precision scores of 93%, 89%, 81%, 76%, and 96%, respectively, for normal, mild, moderate, severe, and DR phases. The analyses of the hybrid modeling, including CNN analysis and SHAP model derivation results, are compared at the end of the paper, and ideal hybrid modeling strategies for deep learning classification models for automated DR detection are identified.