More to the point you're supposed to start with an observation that your current theory can't explain. Then you make a hypothesis that tries to explain the obse

More to the point you're supposed to start with an observation that your current theory can't explain. Then you make a hypothesis that tries to explain the observation and collect more observations to try and refute your hypothesis; if you're a good falsificationist, that is. That doesn't seem to be the process described above. Like you say it's just a pipeline from data to paper, great for writing papers, but not much for science. But I guess these days in many fields of science and in popular parlance "data" has become synonymous with "observation" and "writing papers" with "research", so.