I think you're speaking from a position of ignorance, and discounting an entire field based on your biases, with confirmation in the form of an anecdote about a grad student (or undergrad? - it's not clear).

Of course my comment is partly tongue in cheek, given that its form necessarily shadows your own statement for my desired level of irony.

My own biases come in part from my GF. She's an economist - a social science - and has opened my eyes in many respects. Most of all, it's extremely hard to get good data in the social sciences. She works in healthcare policy evaluation, but all the people collecting data are not trained in it - they're filling out forms, themselves often designed by people not trained in it either. And of course she runs up against the usual "you have to do it for the children" people who dismiss any kind of rational analysis of the cost / benefit of various different healthcare interventions.

Anyway, I'm a bit sensitive about this, because I see a lot of arrogant ignorance, especially in IT, with guys (usually guys in our field) dismissing whole fields that very clever men and women have dedicated entire lives to, without bothering to learn anything about what they're dismissing.

I saw the analogy in some book: imagine there is a shoemaker, who has no access to good materials and good tools. The result of course is that his shoes are terrible. And why you can understand all of the reasons why shoes are terrible—they are still terrible. Good data is hard to get. Yup. Or do you think the data on Higgs boson was easy to get?

That's a different kind of hard to get.

Bad data is easy to get.

Not OP , but your story isn't even anecdotal really it verges onto a friends of a friend story.

Plus rather than saying undergraduate thesis say assignment. Because that's what it really is, not at all related to peer review papers or a doctorate.