Your last sentence is unnecessary and maybe that's why your line of inquiry has me so confused about the point you're trying to make.
The scientific method uses data collection as one of its components. Maybe an example will help: You don't literally buy groceries by driving to the store, but grocery shopping requires driving to the store and said driving, as such, is a part of grocery shopping.
Data collection is a prerequisite for hypothesis testing. Theorizing (as used in science) generates testable hypotheses. Data collection, hypothesis testing and theorizing are all a part of the scientific method.
It would seem that you are particularly concerned about semantics, perhaps so much so that a simple procedure has become unecessarily complicated