I upgrade the sql2005 stuff until a very recent release, something SP2′ish.
For, eh, legal/corporate(employer/business guest at MSFT) and so reasons I stopped this hacking work.

In SQLServer 2008 there is still no dmv (v$ for Oracleites) view per session or so.
But there is something really new and interesting that can present wait events: XEvents.
With XEvents you can trace every wait ( and a lot of other events) and get extra context information when they happen.
I presented on this subject on Miracle’s SQLServer Open World. An abstract for PASS2008
was rejected last week Probably everybody in the SQLServer world already knows
so much about XEvents and Wait event based profiling..

There is a simple-talk.com paper in the making…

Chris Muir described this kind of “free” very well here. It’s resonates with PostgreSQL & EnterpriseDB.

Nice thoughts.
I agree completely.
Your last reason is very important. People, many times, do not share knowledge, due to insecurity. Sounds funny, but it is a fact. They (probably) get “married” to the company and whenever they are acknowledged as S.P.O.C. (Single Point-Of-Contact), it soothes their ego.
Such people will do everything they can, to sabotage any plans to prepare / update documents.

In my experience, setting up a successful system, either complex or simple, requires a systematic approach from the start. And, which cannot be said enough, simplicity!

A database needs to be adjusted as little as possible. Sourcecode needs to be version controlled, Even in very small simple environments. Production environments need software releases, explicitly tagged from the version control. Not a few files to be fiddled with in order to make it work again.

Happy easter!