But when groups use epigenetics to study poverty related stress, risk of depression, etc, there is a very different political structure than when comparing drugs to see what kills cancer cells in a dish. The trend seems to be to publish borderline findings with a nature vs nurture argument to explain differences as environmental, not genetic, and call for action as well as more funding to expand the research and find ways to environmentally or behaviorally prevent the problem. Optimistically, it's trying to solve problems. The issue is that important findings will be mixed in with a lot of questionable results that sound appealing to liberal academic journal editors and get a free pass at publication in top journals, a process which feeds back into the SJW gravy train of getting more academic grants to do more of the same. And with sciency techniques and big data approaches, what could be more fashionable? It really does a disservice to the subset of epigenetic research which is well conducted and reproducible. If the epigenetics bubble pops a bit, good. Other fields could use the attention.
The point you seem to be arguing could also be applied to the funding of string theory, and is one that I agree with. You won't find people like Lee Smolin saying that the disparity in research funding in these areas is due to "SJWs", rather they would point to the short term vision of those who provide the funding (amongst other factors).
If it was required, you'd be willing to pay the (large, but economically justified) cost of archiving the data.
From the data generation perspective, there are so many possible sources of biases from preparing the biological sample to sequencing of the sample, it can be difficult to control for all these variables in the down-stream analysis.
