Part of the problem, as a sibling mentioned, is that many people get into these kinds of fields from non-programming or even computer-illiterate backgrounds. At an undergraduate level, even in heavily numerical disciplines like physics, there is relatively little coding. Even then, it's tedious crap like F90 and bulletproof C. So people get into a Masters or a PhD in a field they love and are suddenly confronted by data analysis, and they have no idea what to do.
I've spoken a lot to my girlfriend (an astrophysicist) about this, as she's in this position herself. It's not that she isn't smart, she just has little to no experience with data wrangling and she's (in my opinion) been inadequately trained. I've solved things with Python one-liners that she would have spent literally days doing manually. We've had conversations along the lines of:
"But why does this file have 700 lines of input data filenames hardcoded? You know you could write some code to grab them for you?"
"Yes, but in the time it would take me to write the code, I may as well do it by hand." [In the end I wrote a 5 line regex to do it]
So I can assure you, people question the manual process and they think you're magical when you show them a quicker way of doing things. However, often there isn't the motivation or confidence to try and be magical themselves.