I mean, this is probably how things should be done.
Having the specialists of each field appropriately resourced, focused and aligned streamlines everyone’s life. The problem comes in that most places either get the scientists to pull double duty and we end up in the scenario scientists are pushing messy, subpar code out the door that nobody else wants to touch because they’re unsupported and operating out of their depth, and devs don’t want to touch it because they’re not keen to fix someone else’s hacky code and because they probably have other priorities and the science stuff likely isn’t well integrated into the rest of the other code-delivery and monitoring systems.
The big thing is prestige, it takes some pretty big brains to write good, clean production infrastructure that doesn't fall over every five minutes.
Those big brains are absolutely capable of learning the math and doing the creative work of modeling.
They want to do the creative work.
Which means that if you create a prestige gradient and don't let your engineers do interesting things they themselves might get a paper out of, you lose good engineers and get bad engineers instead.
This is also a constant problem. In DevOps and SRE, the very best devops and sre people are absolutely incredibly mercurial and mercenary - because they've been fed total lies about building systems again and again when the net job description is "hey ops person, this application I wrote is misbehaving can you do advanced troubleshooting on this server for me do I can go do leetcode".
This. There is no clean application of comparative advantage here. The great individual that will rewrite the code and knows all the details to get the model scalable, robust and production ready, can also do the data science "creative" work.
If you are not willing to grow to become that person you are only damaging yourself long term. And if you don't attribute that individual's work: a) this is unethical b) they will, and should leave.
Having the specialists of each field appropriately resourced, focused and aligned streamlines everyone’s life. The problem comes in that most places either get the scientists to pull double duty and we end up in the scenario scientists are pushing messy, subpar code out the door that nobody else wants to touch because they’re unsupported and operating out of their depth, and devs don’t want to touch it because they’re not keen to fix someone else’s hacky code and because they probably have other priorities and the science stuff likely isn’t well integrated into the rest of the other code-delivery and monitoring systems.