This also ignores the overhead of business processes. The dev effort may be very low to switch the (flawed) example of text to database, but the product/project

This also ignores the overhead of business processes. The dev effort may be very low to switch the (flawed) example of text to database, but the product/project team is going to have to create and maintain stories for it, the qa team is going to have to test it, the documentation team is going to have to update their information (where necessary, of course), the support team is almost guaranteed to get calls about it so they need to be informed, and I don't know about you, but my production data rarely looks like my dev/qa data, so there's the non-zero potential for bugs to creep up in the data migration. All of that sounds a lot more than "the same" to me.