I think you could easily get 10 years into a web dev career and never meet a truly fantastic DB person. Most companies just aren't successful enough to need one

I think you could easily get 10 years into a web dev career and never meet a truly fantastic DB person. Most companies just aren't successful enough to need one. I am a reformed MySQL user, but one of my overly-normalized MySQL DBs has been running in production for almost 10 years without any optimization of queries, tables, or indices (beyond some naive indices I created when deploying it). My point is that you can throw an excellent RDBMS onto some decent hardware and serve millions of requests for a CRUD web app without really thinking too hard about it.