The honest truth is there's just a certain acceptable level of jank in a scientific lab.

Not everything needs to be measured to a high precision to be useful, and it's always a balance of how much effort you want to expend versus how useful that extra accuracy/precision is.

If all you care about is "when you're getting close to a critical mass, your instruments will look like this," you don't care that you have a wide swing in your data. You just want to show a difference from baseline.