I think that you are very right in pointing out that a lot of articles/people have a naive understanding of what data science actually means in a lot of applications, especially in building production stuff in companies.

However, away from the immediate operational needs of companies a lot of research is actually not mechanical at all: think of all the fancy data science in going from AlphaGo to AlphaGo Zero to Alpha Zero.

Also, while I think you hit a great point it feels like your claim is a bit too general. i.e. As if you were saying “people think being a pilot is just flying Jet planes and wearing sunglasses while for most of the time you have to train and do crunches which is really boring”.

I think your title should be more like “why [an average job in] data science might just not be worth it [for you if you think it’s just about building classifiers]”