I don't disagree with you on any points. I have some academic friends who mostly do "a ton of munging and then some basic stat functions", as you say (but with

I don't disagree with you on any points. I have some academic friends who mostly do "a ton of munging and then some basic stat functions", as you say (but with less sensitive data). The problem is that their workflow is prone to human error. Even though the stat functions are simple, the proper labeling of inputs and outputs is less reliable. I have some research published for which I wrote MATLAB code years ago. I trust the fundamental results but not the values displayed in the tables. I would have personally benefited from rudimentary version control and unit testing.