I might have a hard time seeing the rigor if there were a lot of romance. But I don't really think so.

I think biology and softer sciences are really tricky. It's very easy for them to fade into the woodwork of a story unless something is done to highlight their existence. I do notice well thought-out evolutionary schemes on alien worlds. I also definitely noticed some interesting biology in David Brin's Glory Season. But both of those are front and center and hard to ignore.

And I have definitely noticed some really interesting and well thought out implications of various bits of linguistics and psychology in some of Suzette Haden Elgin's work.

Psychology and sociology are even harder, and they so often bleed into politics. I think, for example, that Heinlein was generally a poor writer for physics or the implications of interesting technologies (for example there is one story in which he has a character who has memorized log tables and does all the calculations before entering the values into a computer), but that he understood sociology, psychology en masse, and politics better than most.

I think that mostly what I have is a bias towards only seeing this quality in physics or technology.