I think a lot of people in this thread have never actually worked on a Really Big Project. Once you have two or three offshore teams, a hundred developers, associated support staff, multiple product teams, competing customer voices, multiple production environments in different locations with different support, "standards" imposed from external orgs that make no sense for the project at hand...

That's when DevOps gets really helpful and valuable. But if you haven't worked in environments like that, you have no idea what it's like.