SharePoint Dragons

Why is it that hordes of SharePoint 2010 developers try to lift the list throttling settings or think that it’s a magical button that allows you to optimize the SharePoint farm for whatever amounts you may need (e.g. I want to retrieve 100.000 items, luckily, if I raise the list throttling settings to 100.000 it won’t affect server performance at all!). There’s gotta be some best practices regarding this area, no? We propose the following Wiki page as the starting point: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/8723.sharepoint-2010-best-practices-list-throttling.aspx