Open source GIS is awesome if you're able to go your own way and don't need someone to hold your hand through every step of the process. The sheer amount of functioning - and fast - code & data is pretty much unparalleled. It doesn't hurt that most of it is free (as in beer) and accessible to anyone with time, interest, and a willingness to learn.

Echoing your point though, you have to be willing to code. However, I've been working with geospatial data for going on four years now in various academic settings, and it still blows my mind that I can process a very large amount of publicly available data, very quickly, on old equipment and make meaningful contributions to research & policy.

Source: Worked through ~1.3K hdf5 files in the last couple of hours