Ehhhh, data isn’t necessarily sacrosanct. Bad methodology, bad equipment, or bad presentation can lead to biased or misleading data. Hell, every once in a while purely fabricated data slips through the cracks.
It’s still the best guide we have, and mountains of data from disparate sources should be very suggestive indeed, but science involves being able to question even well-accepted hypotheses, on the slim-but-non-zero chance that all that data was based on some common methodological flaw. If the hypothesis is correct, it’ll stand up to scrutiny.
Yeah, you’ll get some whackadoos with their thumbs in their navels, but those whackadoos are an important part of the scientific ecosystem; random mutations in scientific evolution which every once in a long while turn out to be useful, if only in getting serious scientists to look at a problem from a new angle. Stagnation’s a bitch.