I might be reading too much into your story, but if your CV indicates that you're "much better at doing the specialty science I was trained to do and have done than" CS stuff, a good interviewer might be concerned whether you had the necessary CS knowledge / programming skills.
To me at least, an interview is not to flatter the candidate by asking questions they're most comfortable with, but to make sure they have the requisite skills expected for the job. If the job expects X, Y and Z, and they seem like they're good at X and Y, you spend the time checking whether they're reasonably competent at Z as well.
In my case, the ~30 years of experience I've had as a software developer, data scientist, assistant professor, and quantitative researcher - not to mention my refereed publications in several computation-heavy areas - should be proof enough that I possess the minimal amount of programming skills for the job.
Either that or I've been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes for 3 decades.
In my present and past experience, the asymmetry of what is required for a computational scientist (the science, the programming, the CS whiteboard stuff) vs. software engineer (software engineering) is quite pronounced. YMMV.
To me at least, an interview is not to flatter the candidate by asking questions they're most comfortable with, but to make sure they have the requisite skills expected for the job. If the job expects X, Y and Z, and they seem like they're good at X and Y, you spend the time checking whether they're reasonably competent at Z as well.