> Also, most of the time, models don't really matter. What makes or breaks most DS projects is soft-skills, stakeholder management, and data cleaning / feature engineering.

I have the same impression. I did my Master's degree in data science, but I quickly realized that coming up with ideas and running the models is the easy part. Doing the engineering work + synthesizing everything such that value creation occurs is more difficult.

I'm happily doing mostly data engineering + stakeholder management instead of hyperparameter tuning.