> I have actually written papers that try do to a bit of that and it was annoyingly hard to publish them.
I don't know what field you work in, but in my field (fluid dynamics) these papers are not uncommon, though often poorly done. There's a relatively new ASME journal on the subject too: http://verification.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/journal.a...
> On the contrary, we would love to do more of it. But there is next to no funding to do it.
Perhaps this is the crux of the disagreement then. I don't need extra funding to do what I should be doing in the first place. It can be a big time sink in some cases (e.g., I probably spent 6+ months compiling existing data during my PhD), but often is not. It will probably make your model look worse than you'd like, but if everyone did it then science would progress faster.