No-one is the perfect vision of anything.

But I have observed cases where people complain about issues that they have the technical ability to fix. With Open Source software there is nothing but time preventing them from fixing the issues in question. I suggest that management assign a portion of the time of such people towards fixing such problems.

I am part of a team that runs a reasonable number of servers. We try to test all of the functionality in a development area. For a reasonably large subset of the functionality, we simply lack the bandwidth and test cases to fully test the software as we deploy it. Our users are much more ingenious at breaking our configurations than we are. I always try googling for an answer before filing a bug report on open source software (not always on major vendor supported software). I rarely can look at the source code and find the bug quickly, primarily because I lack the basic knowledge of how the code is internally structured and what other problems have been addressed in similar areas. I would love to have the deep knowledge of the software I am using, but what resources I have to learn applications, I am primarily spending on the custom code our in-house developers write.

Maybe I am not your perfect vision of a sysadmin. Even in your example of logs filling up a filesystem, usually it takes something happening to one server (or getting close to happening), to cause us to look at the other servers and implement solutions. With many competing priorities we are primarily reactive. We all want to be proactive, but getting to where we can be is hard.

As we all know writing changes whilst solvingproblem needs to be fully regression tested with each upgrade prior to release.