@sgf Something similar happened when he entered into politics—entering into a domain where there was a lot of data but no synthesis of that data that could be easily synthesized by a law consumer—but his major innovation there was in the "for a lay consumer" piece.
PEC and Votamatic (among many others) were running around, I even had my own model that I played with during that era as a hobby project.
There were also a lot of pundits who thought they knew better than the polls.