Thanks for changing the title, I always just err on the side of leaving it, even if it is absolutely terrible (as this one originally was).
On the actual topic, it's always interesting to see things go differently than economists expected. I fill an economist-ish role at work and it's kind of amazing to see the union of hand wavey-ness and certainty that pervades so much of the field. We drill down hard on data and stick with open source tools like Python as much as possible, but I definitely look around and see supposition treated as fact.