It would be great if the SQL Server install process would present a handful of well described profiles from which the DBA can choose based on the intended useage pattern.
That's kinda what I'm saying (although I envisaged it as a "dial" after installation but the two are close enough). I think I'm taking a slightly more abstract view though. In my eyes a database is a data repository, nothing more. I don't even care that it's a DB as opposed to a file system or some bloke sat in an office furiously shuffling postit notes around... it's just data. I want it to store data and feed it back to me when I want it. I don't care how it does that but I would like to know it's doing it in the most efficient way possible (which admittedly probably rules the postit notes out). Come to think of it in my absolute utopia even the dial would be redundant. The repository would simply select the best aproach to handling whatever operation was being thrown at it right now.
Now obviously that's an unrealistic ideal but is, none the less, the direction I'd like to be shooting for. I'll never get all the way there but the closer the better.
I wish developers in general would stop using the us vs them paradigm
Just to be clear I was only joking about a world without DBAs. Not sure if that came across or not but I hope it did. Come to think of it, you guys currently are my "dial" and I'm grateful for it (well, most of the time anyway).