It sucks that you are doing the boring data cleansing job. And those people with degrees do the more interesting higher level analysis.

That's actually quite common, especially in financial industry. I work at a financial company and do the same line of work building data management tools/ETL systems that provide data to researchers on demand. There are many interesting challenges but a lot of grunt work too. Many of my teammates have CFA certs and math + CS degree (though non-PhDs) so majority of them are definitely capable of performing high-level analysis/financial modeling. However, only a few are needed to do research, the rest implementing and maintaining data infrastructure, which is quite a lot of work and needs more head counts.

Data cleansing + pipelining requires a certain degree of cleverness.

Sounds more like a "data monkey" (no offense)

Data monkey or data engineer? #loadedlanguage

Data Sanitation Engineering