That idea just doesn't stand to reason, though, to be fair, if you say "most companies that" you're expressing a stereotype, which can easily fail, as it does h

That idea just doesn't stand to reason, though, to be fair, if you say "most companies that" you're expressing a stereotype, which can easily fail, as it does here, when applied to a specific case. I personally know a "such a small development team" (i.e. a single person) who certainly has the expertise, by virtue of having trained to become an Oracle DBA after a fairly extensive career as a software engineer. As for need, I'm no expert on Oracle's unique features, but the GP specifically mentioned "reverse-engineering stored procedures", which implies at least previous developers thought there was a need to use an arguably advanced database feature. In fact, even just having a substantial quantity of stored procedures written in PL/SQL, perhaps at a time when that company had (or contracted out to) a larger development team may make it prohibitive to switch to any other language. Reliably implementing business logic as-is is a pretty big feature.