[michaelochurch]

I can only speak for myself here, but I find a lot of what you described as "grunt work" to be fun. Yes, it's true that when you work with real world data, you don't only work on the mathematical modeling, and you spend a lot of time just setting yourself up to be able to do what is typically called the "fun" part. For me, personally, I find all of the work involved to be fun-- even setting up a data pipeline and figuring out how to distribute a computation. Automating away grunt work and setup process is fun, too.

Part of what makes data science fun is the machine learning itself. And an equally interesting part of it is is that it involves so many other parts of computer science that a typical corporate job would call "too hard" and isolate you from.

At least based on what I've seen, data scientists are respected and this means they get dibs on the most interesting projects. However, the interesting projects themselves involve a lot of detailed work (that's the nature of technology) and if you're that interested, you're going to want to do it yourself, at least until you really understand the problem (at which point, you'll automate the dull stuff).