because of a long established undercurrent of competition within departments (and even between professors) for recognition and advancement. That and there are some people that have very large but very fragile egos that can't allow another person or discipline to grab more sunlight than them.

I'm a heavy equipment mechanic, and every day in the shop I hear other guys complaining about how an engineer fucked up a design on a piece of equipment and that's why it failed. Or that the engineer made it hard to work on on purpose. So cringe. I just roll my eyes at them and tell them if they are so smart then why aren't they the ones designing the equipment lol

Its sad that all the fields feel the need to shit 9n each other. We as a society would got a lot further if we could all get along 😁

a physical chemistry experiment will have 1000 data points per trend line; I organic chemistry will have 10 data points, and biochem will have 2 data points.

There is an element of truth in this, but that one biochem datapoint probably took more money and (wo)manpower than a hundred phys chem datapoints. Which is sad, because biological systems are usually more complex, and therefore more 'noisy', needing more datapoints for a definitive result. Medical studies get a lot of datapoints for obvious reasons, and because they can afford to do it thanks to Merck et al.