I always know what's on my servers all the time; I build immutable servers and throw away the old. And I'm not particularly knowledgeable or skilled at this; I just use a little good sense. I mean, your problems with devops may actually exist, but this is silly.
At Localytics, adding a new Play 2.x (our current standard) app into our new deployment infrastructure takes one command and about 120 seconds. The only part for which a developer needs devops input is the first production deploy, which require a signoff and some (automated, but privileged) IAM permissioning. Adding a new app on a framework we haven't incorporated yet (Rails is probably next) would take a few days, but needs only be done once for all developers at the company. And we know it works with our entire ecosystem.
You might have had bad experiences in the past, but you're extrapolating from them to the state of the world. It's not what you think.