Probably the biggest part of a lot of projects is cleaning up and normalizing the data (just like it was with data warehousing last century). A lot of high power data scientists don't want to hear that--especially if they're research-y.
If you don't at least tolerate data cleaning, you should find a different job than data scientist.
I would have expected the researchy people to be better at it, as often you'll need to collect and analyse your own data during grad programs, and thus have some experience.
