[spmurrayzzz]

I appreciate the time you took to write this all out (both the article and your response here). In particular, this line from the article resonated with my own experience over the last couple of decades:

> This particular setup—viewing DE as a very technical, general-purpose distributed system SWE discipline and making the people who know best what real-world scenarios they want to model—makes our setup work in practice.

The common analyst-to-DE path has some benefits for sure with respect to business-centric data modeling, but without the deep technical infrastructure investments and related support, the stack becomes a beast to deal with at scale (or just ends up being a massive cost on the balance sheet from outside vendor sourcing). You really need both verticals in order to be optimal IMO.

Of course if internally an org doesn't already have the platform/infrastructure to dogfood in the first place, this admittedly makes the proposition a bit more of a gamble.