Granting SA privileges for Developers on the development box
If it's not too late, one compromise option that I've seen work well is rather than upgrade the permissions or replacing the developers' existing accounts, create a separate account that is only used when they need the elevated permissions.

So normally they work under individual "restricted" accounts (which I use loosely because these restricted accounts still need some hefty permissions &mdash; ie create, drop, alter for tables).  But for that rare occasion when they think they need sa, they can log in using this account.  Then you can flag the account in your logs and do extra monitoring on it.  You've given the developers the access they asked for, but in a way that's a little more controllable.

Eventually, if there's abuse, the logs on this account can be used as evidence to take it away.