> This, along with the cost of development, is why I have a pet-peeve for hard-coded business logic directly in the code (in most cases).

I’ve built systems both ways. Requiring a developer to make changes definitely has costs, but it does have benefits as well. Systems configured in data rather than code will almost invariably be untested and prone to configuration bugs. Overall, I’ve spent probably double or triple the time debugging configuration of complex business rules systems than I would have if it was just written in code and unit tested.