The comment wasn't fully aimed at you. I actually agree with most of your points. Hence why engineers now have the whole, professional engineer title.
Quite aware of Comp Sys Eng, as my major was Electrical Engineering as well. ( although, im one of those so called "drop out", because I left at the end of my third year at cornell on a leave, to join the dotcom craze, heck, i'm still technically a matriculated student, 11 years later lol)
I see the systems engineer role in IT, and perhaps due to my experience, as more in tune to the original role created out of large engineering projects. There needed to be engineers that were looking at the big picture, but knew enough on how individual components worked, to best utilize, integrate, and manage them.
ie, what I have done in the last few companies, aside from the normal sysadmin role, is to see projects from conception to completion. From sitting down at design meetings, to reviewing design documents, to setting general system rules, to figuring out network and systems architecture, to doing code walk thrus ( verbal ones most of the time), to devising launch strategies, etc etc. Many of the projects come out of the sys engineering team, having dev's be a resource to sysadmins ( the way it works at google.com btw, with their SRE team, as well as many other companies )
My real peeve though, is that somehow, many devs, while doing no more different work than a cert monkey, somehow feel "holier than though".
In the end though, most people that get to do interesting work are usually either highly motivated, or lucky. And those come in both the sys admin/eng word, and in development.
