That it's anecdotal.

You dony have to have full blown market research to be empirical, btw. Surveys are fine.

But it does need to be qualitative, quantitative, and verifiable.

You don't have any of those things from just discussions over the years.

What you have is an observed trend that has not been evaluated by any meaningful methodology.

I'm not bashing anecdotal evidence. It's a good starting point at looking at a thing. It's the noticing of a phenomenon.

But it's not more than that.

And it's not me you're disagreeing with. It's the dictionary and pretty much ever science book ever written that teaches the scientific method.

I assume you had the same basic grade school education all the rest of us did, yes?