Poor developers, and poorly documented security, or poor separation of duties. I thought the same thing for Great Plains accounting years ago needing SA. Why? Only one thing, adding new logins and users. Even allowing securityadmin seemed crazy. At that time, we ended up giving dbo (SQL 2000) in the db, and creating the logins manually. The app could add a user mapped to a login, so we required a ticket for new users. More secure, a few times a year work for DBAs.