I watched Ben Krasnow Make permanent magnets in iron nitride And was struck by the fact that around half of the video consisted in making a magnetometer – a device to measure and characterize the magnet he had just made. This is really the difference between doing science and simply playing: if you want to test or improve a procedure, you must be able to measure how it works.
When he puts his homemade magnet in the apparatus, Ben discovers that he made a fundamentally mediocre magnet, compared to the samples of his amply supplied magnetic drawer. But it is an excellent first point of data, and more importantly, the construction of the magnetometer gives it a means of measuring future improvements.
Of course, there is a time and a place for “quite good is good enough”, and you can easily spend more time building the measuring device for a particular project than simply managing the experience, but it is not science. Have you ever descended the measurement rabbit hole, spending more time validating or characterizing the effect you do in the first place?