I've been doing the data thing for a while. During one of my defenses of R, someone brought up that R was a black hole. That if you programmed in R, you were a user who just filled in the correct function arguments and it just spit out the answer. And that was when my thoughts on machine learning changed.

The vast majority of us are users. We massage the data to be in a certain shape, then feed it through a machine that someone else created. We can change the parameters. We can change the data. But few of us are going to look in to the code of a random forest function.

I've switched tracks and started doing web development. Playing with the hyper parameters in machine learning is no different than changing the feel of a drop down by changing the colors, fonts and other things to fit a certain aesthetic.

I could be wrong, but I have yet to meet anyone that has done anything besides use packages created by others to call themselves data scientists. I think that opens it up to becoming just another tool no different than Excel.