Math fans tend to discount and dismiss applied statistics as being not math, in a way that they don't do for physics, for some reason I don't fully grasp.
I think it's because statistics gets a bad reputation from the legions of terrible social scientists in the wild, who can easily publish false but socially interesting results that get applied to our real lives. Mathematically fraudulent physics, on the other hand, usually immediately dies in the engineering phase, leaving just a few rambling cranks that most of everyone ignores.
Also (and related) perhaps, just as dry mathematical statistics ignores real world empirical experimentation, "wet" applied statistics goes to far into ignoring the math completely, because too few empirical scientists are able to understand the math when they would wncounter itm