Is my web app idea worth the effort?
pedalpete: Does Joe Data analyst exist? and if so, is he able to gather enough data, and conceptualize what he is actually looking for?
I put this in the realm of wolframalpha, where most people (even hackers & programmers) can't word a query well enough to get the data they want back.From my experience non-programmers aren't able to manage large enough volumes of data to require data analysis. At the company I used to work for, there were people in IT who's job was specifically to build and run reports at the request of retail managers. The problem would not be resolved if you could just give the retail managers a data analysis tool, as they didn't know how to get the data out of the databases. 
In some ways, is this the market that pipes or dapper.net are trying to do?