In many parts of scientific research, researchers are, to stay in your metaphor, more travelers using a map, than map makers.

Of course, it is a difference whether you make a clinical study on drugs, and use a pocket calculator to compute a mean, or whether you research in numerical analysis, or are presenting a paper in how to use Coq to more efficiently prove the four-color theorem or Fermat's last theorem.

In short, much of science is not computer science, and for it, computation is just a tool.