It's a somewhat insulting stereotype to think of designers as merely being interested in "sexy color schemes". There are many people in the design/UI/UX space

It's a somewhat insulting stereotype to think of designers as merely being interested in "sexy color schemes". There are many people in the design/UI/UX space specialising on (often numeric) information design. They tend to be as fluent as any programmer in statistics, if not more. To this day, programmers tend to conspiratorially suggest to designers to read Edward Tufte, even though his are the first books they make you read in any information design class, and have been since the early 80s.