As a long-time production DBA I fully agree with you. Consider this, in the health care world it is not just SOX (for public companies)  but HIPAA and the other many data privacy regs and laws that make a production DBA critical. The libilities to a health care organization are monumental if the data escapes. In my hospital DBA role, not only do I secure in-house data systems, but I have to force vendors to certify and upgrade their databases to the latest service packs to keep the security up to date.

In another life as a production DBA for a bank system, I didn't develop but assisted a programmer in reworking a critical database program thereby reducing the 80 minute runtime to 7 minutes under full load. My point is that I can do those important production DBA functions and still get the development done.

The production DBA will not disappear as long as data availability and data security remain critical to business' bottom line.