Context is important. The benefits of standardization and defined processes for your production boxes will help you sleep at night!

Now my general context is large shared SQL servers (many databases, many projects) within a corporate intranet. My experience in this context is that leveraging obscure features of SQL can lead to support problems down the road. (We have quite a bit of turn over among our developers.) Such as when person X leaves the company you get problems with objects tied to their NT account.

I don't consider myself to be an idealist, but I believe that context is important. And in general you keep developers off production systems where and when you can. Of course it is important to be practical and reasonable if you want to last in any environment.

Another way to say all this is KISS really pays off.