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Something people don't really consciously notice about English grammar is the concept of "uncountable nouns".
These are nouns like "dirt". It doesn't matter how much dirt there is, it's never "dirts". (Similarly I said "how much" not "how many", and "is" not "are".)
A lot of these are materials, liquids, and particulates, but other examples include things like "advice", or "knowledge".
These are usually things where there's no intuitively descrete unit of singular quantity. What would "a" dirt look like? If you specify units, like "a pile of dirt", suddenly it can take singular and plural forms.
Also, confusingly, some nouns are uncountable in certain contexts. In "My truck is made of metal" and "I took a load of metal to the dump", "metal" is uncountable. However, in "ancient cultures highly valued precious metals", or "steel is a useful metal for industry" it takes a countable form.
All this is to say, I think you should probably be saying data should be considered an "uncountable singular noun", not a singular one.
I think this comes down to whether, as mentioned earlier, you can readily quantify an intuitive singular unit of data. A datum. If it sounds weird to say "the data are clear", then it's probably because it's not obvious what "there are 5 data" means. Not clear what "a datum" even refers to. If that's the case, should English abandon the notion of descrete data?
Edit: note there are also plural uncountable nouns ("the police are comming", never "a police is", or "many thanks". (There's no such thing as one singular "thank".)
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^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >

My fourteen points of data are no longer valid. >

!delta
Well, that was easy... I clearly didn't think enough to specify the explicit pluralization from a previous word. >

Data itself is plural. Datum is the singular. 
Is and are both are correct >

But then "datums" are a thing. >

Yes, but datums refers to multiple single pieces of information in isolation and data refers to a collection of information.  Just think of it this way: you cannot have "a data", you can only have "data". >

That makes sense to me. Use latin plural for uncountable data, but the english plural for countable datums.