I wouldn't put it all on the engineers though. Plenty of cases where the business process is not defined and therefore a proper model can't be defined. With that, no amount of RDBMS will likely save you. It's true, there are solutions out there that allow you to get away without defining that model or process. That makes it easier for you to push forward without having to define relationships, constraints, indexes and so forth. Those solutions chosen could not just be the engineers, but just the fact it seemed like the best solution for the problem.

Like you said, if one can do it why can't we all? Is SQL Server really that complicated that another man (or woman) can't duplicate what another company did? In my mind, I don't think so. But there is more to a solution than just the tech. A lot of things have to align to make something that shined for one happen for another that has nothing to do with the whole RDBMS versus NoSQL argument.