"I spent years of my life perfecting these, learning about algorithms, learning the intricacies and quirks of the various datasets we use-- if someone wants to

"I spent years of my life perfecting these, learning about algorithms, learning the intricacies and quirks of the various datasets we use-- if someone wants to take my place in this community as "that guy" then I expect them to devote as much time as I have to learning these techniques inside out and then to do something better than me. I have no desire to pass my code off to a masters student and let him naively plug some dataset into it-- firstly because no one should ever rely on a black box in this field, and secondly because these codes all need to be tweaked to account for the different instruments and data structures being used." The result is that you are important, and no one else can check on you. That's kind of good for you, but there should be a way you can do better. My junior year in college some psychologists told me about a stastistician who would once a year write a paper demonstrating ways that psychologists mis-used some statistical technique. He would quote 20 or 30 psychology papers and explain why their statistics were wrong and so their conclusions were wrong. They lived in fear of him. If there existed robust and reasonably transparent code to do what you do, along with great documentation to show users where the pitfalls are, and you got a valued publication every time you showed that a significant result was done wrong and you gave the better version, very likely you would be better off. I'm pretty sure astronomy would be better off. I don't know how we could get from here to there, but it's something to consider.