Sysadmins are, 99% of the time, responsible for production uptime. Sadly, management includes all of the software being written in-house in this expectation. Change means instability, means that Sysadmins' feet are held to the fire - this makes them resistant to change.

Software developers, on the other hand, are responsible for making changes. Adding features, pushing fixes, and so forth.

These two points of view are inevitably going to cause friction. Developers are only recently starting to be held responsible for production uptime and the pages that come along with that - and it's a good thing for both sides.

That "most trivial issue" for a developer is something the sysadmin was woken up for 3x in the past, and doesn't want to be woken up for again, so he pushes back. How can he not?