[protocolture]

>Might be a tad elitist of me, I guess, but solid DHCP, routing, and DNS setup makes for way more reliable network than anything else.

Depends on the network. If you are talking about a branch office, for sure.

>I find that a lot of "it's always DNS" falls down to "I don't know routing beyond default gateway"

I see it mostly with assumptions. Like DNS Server B MUST SURELY be configured the same as DNS Server A, thus my change will have no unexpected consequences.

[p_l]

Solid management of the services is important, yes. Also being prepared for when requirements change. I remember to this day when a bunch of small (rack-scale) deployments suddenly needed heavy-grade DNS because one of the deployed projects would generate a ton of DNS traffic. My predecessor set up dnsmasq, I didn't have a reason to change it before that, afterwards we had to setup total of 6 DNS servers per rack (1 primary authoritative, 2 secondary updating themselves from authoritative, 3 recursive).

I would say situation also changes a lot if you know/can deploy anycast routes for core network services - for example fc00::10-12 will always be recursive nameservers, and you configure routing so that it picks up the closest one, etc.