I love the pancake analogy. It perfectly describes my first attempts. The problem I see is too many developers never throw away that first pancake but add tons of syrup and toppings to cover for the crappy pancake and in the end, you get really sick eating the thing.

Translation: to support a bad application we, as DBAs are forced to try and tune the database instance and hardware to make up for the bad code and we end up with a monster server for a solution that could have run faster on a tenth the resources.