I like to look at this phenomenon of the negative DBA like this: the nature of the work for a sysadmin (i.e. production DBA) is strikingly different from the development side (i.e. a development DBA). 

A fun way I like to put it is vampires vs werewolves.  I remember Jeff Atwood gave an analogy like that on his blog Coding Horror. Developers are like vampires and admins are like werewolves. The vampire stays up all night coding and doesn't care much about procedure outside of that. Werewolves are quite until there is a full moon (the DB goes down) then transform to a terrible up-time monster. 

So it is the nature of the beast that determines this behavior. 

Anyway - maybe I just like Halloween too much...