@smach

You call it "data carpentry", but I used to refer to this as the portion of my job that was being the "data janitor". (Your term is better.)

When I was working as a research statistician, I was amazed at how much of my job was just making all the incompatible file formats invented by biologists work together. (And how often they manage, somehow, to put special characters in column titles, not balance quote marks, and so on.)

They'd come to me after tearing their hair out in Excel, trying to use pivot tables & Visual Basic, and heaven knows what else.

Often they just wanted a join across 2 tables, or to transpose a table. Fine: read it into R, fiddle about a bit, check the result, write it back out, done.

They thought that was almost a miracle, when it was really just a case of the right tool for the job.

In grad school they never tell you how much of your career will be spent either making presentations to convince non-scientists or doing mathematically trivial stuff.

The *actual* math problems usually came as a relief!