I appreciate everybody's comments. It seems obvious that this is a problem that we all experience regardless of the industry or product that we support.

swwg69 hit the nail on the head by mentioning price. Often managers look at the price tag of the data tier as an aggregate of the hardware costs and software licensing costs. But there are management costs which need to be nailed down and communicated when moving to a more complicated architecture and then there are costs that are much harder to relate to currency. Those costs include development process limitations and deployment risks. With deployment risks also comes potential down time and bugs being injected.

In the end, if a dollar value can be put on the decision then we can become more successful at educating those who do not hold our specialty.