So we should sacrifice all the things that actually make a Data Scientist's work valuable in the name of fun and obscuring mistakes?

Fun I almost get, obviously good for productivity (though I think you'd really be sacrificing productive output for non-productive output), but I just don't get where you're even coming from with the "making mistakes more obvious" angle.

I think he was being facetious. Of course we need all these things, but data science right now is still not that mature I guess.

I blame software.

I don't understand why we couldn't have some system, perhaps using strace and friends, which tracks everything I ever do, and how every file was created. Then I could just say "how did I make X?"

Make it happen!