I'm not sure how accurate or exagerrated the OP's examples are, but here is how I'd fix a number of them:

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.

Have a regularly scheduled release train so everyone in the company knows when new releases can go out (i.e. every Friday night, etc.) and can plan ahead accordingly. If a release misses the train, then it can wait for the next one to leave the station. This allows all groups to plan ahead, make sure they have resources available, etc.

The production and development environment just aren't in synch and this never gets addressed.

This is pretty inexcusable, it's a matter of laziness or unwillingness to spend the time to make the environment better. You can clearly see the effects of this bad practice when you have releases that fail in production and have to be re-tried several times. If the production environment is so complex that it can't easily be mirrored in development, at the very least the release should be tested in a staging environment (not QA) which does mirror production - so you can test the release process itself.

The fundamental problem that nhashem seems to be describing are admins that don't seem to care too much about whether or not new software releases are being released in a timely fashion to production. While I understand that the admins have a whole lot of other areas to also be responsible for, the entire reason why someone wants to release this software in the first place is that there is some business value in the release/new version/feature etc. Not allowing this release to reach customers as fast as possible reduces it's value. If the company is not focused on getting value in front of the customer as quickly as possible, then why are they even spending the time developing the software/changes in the first place?

This is why it's a management failure - a failure to plan, get teams to work together, and cut things down to the bottom line of delivering value to the customer as rapidly as possible while still maintaining stability and other responsibilities. Company's that can't do these things will have their lunch eaten by competitors who can.