Ooooooo....

I think if I found one of my developers using SMO to access database objects directly, that person would be found hanging from a cross in the morning.

This situation is exactly what having an API full of stored procedures is for. The devs should never be querying base tables directly, or updating database / server level settings.

Any dev wishing to try using a programmatic interface to access SQL Server would also likely run into permission problems, as the credentials they have may not have permissions on various objects.