Those environments have totally sucked, because to pigeonhole people into those roles in the first place requires a non-flexible, non-creative culture.
There is a proper balance to everything, but few organizations succeed in finding it.
I guess most people would only like to be the "head surgeon" because of the implied status (and not really knowing what it is like to be e.g. Linus Torvalds). But personally, I wouldn't mind doing a specialized job like the tools programmer or language lawyer because these are still interesting jobs allowing good forward progress to be made.
If the load of tedious work like build systems is too much, and the best we can do is either load-balance it across the team or dump it on some schmuck, maybe that just means we should try harder to break up projects into smaller units so that process doesn't completely dominate them.
What do you mean a source control person, just someone who manages the source control when it goes wrong? The programmers are still doing the committing, pushing, pulling, branching themselves
She hated that job, BTW. :)