Me too. This is why I went into data science years ago. It's more difficult, but when correlated with difficulty you can get a good feel how creative the project is going to be.
Don't you have to make analyses and reports "production quality?" I found that fun at first, but now it's annoying when 25% of my code is formatting and capitalizing.
No, I'm not a machine learning software engineer, so no productionization on my end. I do find paths forward for the companies I've worked at but a report usually consists of a 1-to-1 with a c-suite pitching the project. If I've written a model, the notebook speaks for itself and naturally looks glorious with plots and what not. I have been known to create power point slides or do larger presentations. It is part of the job but I've never associated the terminology "production quality" with a presentation.