I am not an experimental design specialist, but I am happy to offer whatever relevant advice I can. Incidentally, I am not far from the Bay Area in the next few months.

This is indeed a hard problem to tackle. I do outright say that we may need to attract a different crowd to get all of the skill set needed and suggest data mining as a form of empiricism we are already intellectually equipped to handle because of our demographics. It was my hope that we would start comping a list of things that would be neat to test and then hopefully identify some low hanging fruit.

I think wecan with not too many resources reach the stage where we are doing work as good as the kind we wouldn't have second thoughts about citing as relatively strong evidence in articles.