Developers have more responsibility than ops for knowing their apps, for the simple reason that each developer owns a small number of apps, but ops owns the infrastructure for all the apps.
Why has your organization built a one-size-fits-all ops organization if it doesn't have a one-size-fits-all dev organization? Sounds like a failure of ops organization to recognize that the needs of the email hosting guys are different from the website team or the billing team. Maybe you should build a set of smaller, more focused ops teams focused on meeting the needs of those different groups?
Smaller, more focused ops teams already exists, but are not bound by application boundaries but by system boundaries. (mostly, storage, compute and networking). The reason is because each of these is a completely different environment on its own.
I completely agree. Far too many devs are clueless about how their apps perform or interact with the ecosystem. That tunnel vision has a LOT of negative consequences on infrastructure.
Because the ops org doesnt concentrate on just the one application. They have broad knowledge of the entire stack and therefore don't have as deep of an understanding on any single piece.
The dev org also doesn't concentrate on just one application. I've not seen this situation where every Ops personnel is assigned to the entire stack. Each Ops employee or team in a larger organization is generally responsible for a subset of the environments.