As a DevOps contractor/consultant (depending on the gig), I don't agree with that. Maybe it's just the way I approach my business, but I am also the guy you want designing and building large scale applications. Well, maybe not you, but a decent chunk of my clients do. ;) One startup-unicorn client hired me to advise on DevOps practices and implement the baseline stuff for a new project and I ended up the de facto team lead, banging out JavaScript alongside Chef, just because...it's all the same. Sometimes I write code to spit out web pages, sometimes I write code to spit out EC2 instances or Azure instances. That's what a "devops engineer" is, to me.

As far as the move for the word "sysadmin"--no joke, I blame it on Windows and small- to medium-scale businesses. When for a long time the conception of a "system administrator" is "mouse-driven process-follower", a competent software developer who happens to develop systems that throw EC2 instances around just isn't going to want to be associated with that title.

I'm with you on this. One of the huge advantages of having worn all of those hats is that you have pretty good experience of having seen how badly some interactions can go. I can look at a system design and point out problems that specialists miss. And on the other side of it, I'm a swiss army knife. Need someone to figure out how to get your web app talking to the crusty old COBOL app? I've got ideas on how to pull that off too...