I'll admit I was being slightly factious and open data is making everything much easier these days. But geospatial analysis is mostly just math with a bit of programming while data collection often involves trying to deal with county and state level employees operating with a very high power Someone Else's Problem field and then trying to explain that scanned photocopies of old maps is not quite what I was expecting when they said that they had all their maps 'digitized' :)

But I'm the sort of person that much prefers dealing with math to dealing with people.