RAP does not really address the problems of DBAs, whose primary job is to maintain existing applications. RAP is about new application development, where someone has to decide exactly how to do all the things that the article lists. I assure you, from many many years of application development experience, that these are the things that consume most of new application developers' time.
I guess that's where the disconnect comes from. My experience has mostly been in situations where the DBA team, or the data architecture team, did the data models for new applications. In most of the shops I've been in, DBAs didn't just keep things running, they were active participants in the application development process. They were involved from the very beginning, so we didn't see a lot of the thrashing around trying to figure out the tools or the modeling paradigm or the access pattern.
I think you're making a large assumption about the role of a DBA that may not be universally true. In organizations where the DBAs just keep the lights on and don't have any real understanding of the data over which they watch, you have bigger problems than the choice of application development tools.