Hear, hear. I will also say that most people that will excel at data science may not ever be pushing the envelope of statistical methods enough to warrant writ

Hear, hear. I will also say that most people that will excel at data science may not ever be pushing the envelope of statistical methods enough to warrant writing a research paper. Being able to apply and understand the state of the art algorithms is inherently a great skill to have. The world is a dirty place, and just like there are thousands of applications that just need a developer to implement a CRUD app to expose an API on the web, there are tens or hundreds of domain specific problems to where a 'data scientist' can implement the state of the art data cleaning and machine learning algorithms. However, being able to understand and apply graduate level textbook statistical methods to a large dataset (bigger than an Excel file) might be boring to some research scientists, it is cool as hell to see what the data is saying.