Kristen,
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I rarely need to break a LOG chain. If I do then I have to co-ordinate with sysadmin to get them to do a VSS full backup once I am finished.
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For me the lack of DIFF backups is not too bad. I have a lot of DBs but the biggest is only 46 GBytes. This means I can do a COPY_ONLY full backup every night. Depending on the instance, my log backups happen every 10mins to every 60mins. I can quickly generate the RESTORE LOG commands using powershell; when they are pasted into SSMS they run remarkably quickly. Fortunately I have never come across a corrupted full backup of a production DB. Maybe this is because part of my full backup routine is to RESTORE the backup and run CHECKDB. When I restore a Production DB to a test or training environment the last full backup, without logs, is usually good enough.
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I can see why sysadmin would want to be able to restore a working server without a corrupted database. I also know I need my own backups. As long as the sysadmins co-operate with the DBAs both should be possible. Of course I have met Mr Theory before!