you could go to disk in v6.5, did it for years. Never to tape directly since that was slow, and error prone.

Devices are there precisely to have the same script/code on every server. So you could a one script that backed up everything to once device. This was left over from the Sybase/tape world, and I think it's a poor practice as well for the same reason.

It's too easy to code around the need for the same name these days to do that. If it were 400 lines of script I could see devices working well, but with simple T-SQL/VBScript/Powershell, why do it?