Did you ever the pleasure to work with a Six Sigma Black Belt who had the most of one week statistics training? I am one, but honestly this is just enough to do some back-of napkin number crunching for purely operational purposes. That you need a math PhD is maybe exaggerating as well on the end of the spectrum.

That being said, the abilit to talk to domain experts and accept their experience is one of the most important skills for a true data scientist. Without proper context all the data in the world gets you nowhere.