If the (let's be honest, rather unintelligent on average) organisms inhabiting one planet in one star system is enough to make a galaxy "special", I feel like the universe must be an awfully boring place.

Well, we have the mice. And maybe dolphins.

Then it's worse than not useful, it's potentially very misleading - real-world data (and salaries in particular) do not always follow that distribution. There's a reason medians are often the preferred benchmark.

Yeah, but those two numbers are so far apart that any reasonable person (and probably most unreasonable ones too) could probably have guessed that. If I say "the average human body temperature is between 20 and 70 degrees Celsius", while I may be technically accurate, I'm in no way communicating useful information.

That's like saying "the average human adult is between 4 and 7 feet tall" - technically I'm sure it's true, but it is in no way useful information.