If you opened any scientific journal, picked only the articles that seemed the least "relevant" to the mainstream, and quoted their abstracts without delving into the interesting, by which I mean actual, parts of their research, you could probably make scientific study seem stuffy, over-intellectual, and completely unworthy of serious study.

Hell, look at the critics of scientific education who say things like "Why does my kid need to study fruit flies? What if I want my kid to study humanity instead?" You'd respond that not only does that argument miss the value of studying fruit flies, but it misses the deeper reason why we study science at all.