With a good PI, indeed it is, but similar to you, my experience is limited to neuroscience and biology departments.

I have a feeling that the further you get from math, the more restrictive the intellectual atmosphere becomes. Math, as a tool, makes it much easier to successfully and productively stray from consensus since the opposition would require "better math" (to put it crudely) to defeat it, and math is math. There's no way around it.