I think it really depends on what you're trying to do. I'm all for statistical rigour, and stats will help you with a nice structured dataset. A lot of the time

I think it really depends on what you're trying to do. I'm all for statistical rigour, and stats will help you with a nice structured dataset. A lot of the time though knowing how to scrape data and convert between formats opens opportunities that a pure statistician wouldn't have. Most of the interesting visualizations I've seen lately don't involve much stats at all.