Oracle Database Discussions

As an application DBA, I prefer to keep my database pretty locked down. But as DBA with a developer background, I can appreciate having limited access in environments like production. So in our shop, developers currently have read access to all of our data via roles. And they have the ability to create objects under their schema on the users tablespace, which is at 5G (the entire database is around 1T). This morning, I was informed that developers/analysts/testers/etc should not have any create/write privileges in any environment above development. This is not something I agree with. I tried to make my point that giving users a small playground in non-dev environments should not cause any issues to the database. But my higher-ups would not have it, and they keep saying "But it's prod. Nobody should have privileges to create anything in prod". And they will soon force me to make significant changes to user roles.

I guess this post is then looking for opinions... What do you think? Should developers be able to create objects in non-dev environments? If so, what about production? What are your arguments for letting users create tables with data under their schemas in production? Or do you have an argument that says they shouldn't be able to create objects in any environment other than dev? Do you have any links to any research articles? Or maybe books that deal with similar questions?

I tried to do a quick google search, but I didn't come up with any results.

Appreciate any insight you might have!

For reference:
Platform: Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit)
Version: 11.2.0.2.0