… After a ton of work like that, you have a nice set of data to which you fit simple statistical models and then it looks super easy to someone who either doesn’t know about the data collection and cleaning process or doesn’t care.
This poses a major public relations problem for serious data scientists. When you show someone a good data science project they almost invariably think “oh that is easy” or “that is just a trivial statistical/machine learning model” and don’t see all of the work that goes into solving the real problems in data science.