I've worked for several "mid-sized" web companies (between 75-200 employees) and this has always been an issue. Here's why:

1) The development team interacts directly with a single business unit but the administrators serve the whole company. So say you're a developer that works in the SEM team. All the technical products and processes that manage the company's SEM campaigns, that's what you work on. You directly communicate with the product team and project management. If there's any bottleneck or issue on your projects as you work on them, the entire team is easily made aware of it. You tell your project manager, "Dan in analytics was supposed to get me the data and if I don't get it tomorrow then I'll be late," and your project manager talks to Dan or Dan's boss and you get your data... or you don't, but it's on Dan anyway.

However the administrators serve the whole company and they have entirely different sets of priorities and responsibilities that you have no visibility into. So you're ready to go to production and you submit your ticket with your release notes, which is pretty much just, "push these files from SVN and run this SQL on this DB." And it just sits there. A day passes. Then another day. Dan asks why your project's not available yet given that it's "done." You ask your project manager to ask what's going on, he says he's trying to find out but the sys admin manager hasn't been around. You try dropping by the admins yourself (usually sequestered in some remote location in your building, if they're even on site at all!) and ask about your project and they snarl and say, "load on the consumer site has been up 12% all week, we have bigger problems" and mumble a bunch of other things about permissions and server racks and subnets and all you know is that whatever to-do list they're working off of, you're all the way at the bottom.

And then...

2) The production and development environment just aren't in synch and this never gets addressed. The sys admins finally get to your ticket a week later. Finally, you think, this will go live. Then two hours later you get an e-mail from an admin named Stan that says, "Release failed, please fix the permissions on the directories your application creates and re-submit the ticket." And your ticket's closed. What the hell? Your application didn't even create any directories.

If you're lucky Stan included a copy-paste of his shell with the commands he used to export your code and whatever barfing error he got. If not you have to hunt Stan down, ask him to see what exactly the error he got was. Stan sighs, because they're just sooo swamped and sooo busy and the site load has been up for 12% since last week, but he grudgingly does what you say. Oh, yes, your application uses a directory which is owned by 'application1' in dev, but is owned by root in production. So you tell him to just chown the directory to application1, and he says submit a ticket. You blow up and say, "You're right there! Just type in the freaking chown command!" and he says he can't, you have to submit a ticket, and then submit another ticket for the release again. Then one of the other admins says, "Stan, foosball?" and Stan gets up to play some goddamn fucking foosball, while your project is now going on its second week of being late.

The next time you meet with your boss and mention how much things easier would be if you could have access to production, and your boss sighs and says it's just not happening. So then you talk to him about how you need better integration with the sys admin team, and it's critical to ensure dev and production environments are identical, and your boss agrees to talk to Stan's boss, and ultimately nothing gets done and you just resent the lack of control over your own projects.