While I haven’t been around since the first edition of the then MSR workshop in Edinburgh in 2004, I can confidently say that I grew up as a researcher in, and together with, the MSR community. From the early days of mining email archives and SVN repositories, to today’s widespread use of AI-based techniques and LLMs, much has changed in how we do MSR research. In this talk I focus on a core MSR activity – quantitatively analyzing large-scale software-related data to draw actionable conclusions – and reflect on how our research methods have evolved over the past 20 years. Have we caught up in our methodological sophistication with researchers in social and behavioral sciences, where quantitative analysis of observational data has a long tradition? Let’s find out together.