I think that you make a
lot of very good points. I have also seen self-entitled, arrogant developers stomping around like they own the place, not respecting the difficulties in different roles (management) or other disciplines. I've seen endless bike-shedding, and endless toy-chasing (at the direct expense of the business).
But I also think that there are some significant problems in what you've said.
You describe what looks like a siloed structure, where sales/marketing people are deciding on what to build, and then throwing it over the fence to the developers to just "get on with". Where are the fast iterations, looping frequently back to the customer, and involving the whole team in the process? Does a developer never have a good idea with regards to features? I think that if you want robots who do what exactly they're told, then you're going to end up with... a development staff of robots.
Meetings. Endless meetings. Agile, if done on a weekly cycle, gives you no fewer than seven mandatory meetings. I don't disagree that it's important to communicate, but the prevailing culture across the industry is absolutely towards superfluous meetings which involve too many people. And I think that's a big problem. Yes, developers need to understand that perhaps not all of a meeting will be relevant to them, but if they're not relevant to the meeting, then really they shouldn't be in it.
"Failing to internalize that ultimately, they work for a business." - I think that the above point on solied structures is relevant here, but I think that there is more also. It depends on the type of business, and I think that you're referring to B2B. But I have personally seen in the B2C case, with millions of users, the sales and marketing side - sometimes from different divisions - preference their own career objectives over the user's experience. "We sold this for a million dollars" "But there's spyware on the partner side sometimes" "Tough. Build the integration". So while I think that you're right when it comes to building a special-case for a particular customer who genuinely needs that special case, I think that there are also other cases here where it's not that simple.
A more minor point but when you say "as though they don't know the language of business", I think you're right, they don't know the language of business!
I find your sports team / jocks vs nerds analogy interesting, perhaps mostly to inform on your general perspective. Personally I would prefer a team of smart developers who care deeply about the product that they build, working hand-in-hand with the product team, designers, sales, and customer in short iterations where rather than deciding precisely what will be built up-front, the solution is instead found organically with valuable contributions from everyone.
But you're dead right on the 'new toys'. That practice is unforgivable.