This is a real problem, in my book. DBAs also have very specialized knowledge, and tend to be expensive, but they're at their most productive when they're doing schema cleanup and index optimization work that can probably only keep a good person busy for a person-month or two per year, tops. And they're also at their most productive when they are preventing problems rather than trying to clean up stains that have already been set by a mess of runtime dependencies.

And all the rest of the time, you've got a very smart person whose job is basically just to make sure the backups are running smoothly.

I'm not sure what the solution there is. Only the largest enterprises can really keep a good DBA busy with work that isn't just skull-splittingly boring. Maybe merge the DBA role with BI or data engineering?