Everyone always looks down on the applied stuff more. Think about manual labor, janitors, etc. Within the sciences, the more math-y fields also look down on the less mathy ones (physics > chem > bio).
To be honest, though, I think everyone belittles everyone in other disciplines. Scientists are among the worst. One computational biophysicist (professor) told me, in all seriousness, that he thought post-modernism was a conspiracy whipped up by the humanities so that none of them could criticize each others' works anymore.
The trend I notice is: the narrower the field, and the higher the degree earned in that field, the worse they belittle other peoples' fields. One of my high school teachers had
two PhDs, one on the kinetic theory of gasses with polar molecules, and another on some branch of thermodynamics (I think... my memory of high school days is fading). He used to joke about "how could you make something like
history get any harder? It's all the same ideas. Well... ok, maybe you could put it in an older language, so it's harder to
read or something, but that's not actually making the
subject any harder."
To be honest, though, you're probably taking this a bit too personally/seriously. A fair amount of scientists make fun of their own fields too. One grad student joked about how physicists still act like it's the stone age, conceptually. "What's in the coconut? *grunts* I dunno. Why not break coconut open with rock?" .... "What's in this electron? Hmm... let's get it moving
reeaaaally fast and smash em into each other, and find out!" And I can't even tell you how often I hear physicists say they pick off all the easy problems, leaving anything remotely hard to other disciplines... or how they just call everything a mass on a spring and model it that way.
I'll remember not to insult them too badly, and make everything perfectly relevant and well-specified, if I have to talk to a group of engineers... but in spirit, scientists act a lot like little children, not taking anything too seriously, laughing at how silly people are, etc. There are a couple INTJs who still take themselves very seriously and hold everything they care about in super-high respects, but overall it's a pretty xNTP field. I think they just got their audience's crossed and stepped on toes without realizing it.
