From some of the private feedback I have been getting on my rant on 3-tiered development, it truly seems that I did not make my point sufficiently clear:
Tiered development is great, when done right and needed. See, I even bolded it. My point is that across 8 jobs on 2 continents with datasets up to 2.5TB and data structures up to 1,200 tables, I have yet to see a single instance where 3-tiered development was needed. I have seen several instances now where an application was designed to be such, but I have yet to see it in practice, let alone done right. In all instances so far, all tiers run on the client.
Forgive my cynicism.