That's a bit inflammatory... My experience with BA's is that they're like anyone else on a team. They are more skilled in certain areas, and they can provide a lot of value if their skills are used appropriately.

I've found BA's are very useful in the following areas specifically

- Communication with the market (either customers or in-market staff such as sales/support) to gather feedback about what they'd want

- Orchestrating decisions (asking all the dozen stakeholders what they want to do and arriving at a sensible conclusing)

- Arbitrating feature/UI decisions (people on the team aren't agreeing on whether we should do something or not)

- Documenting requirements (by this I mean the desired functionality that we believe customers need/want)

- Iterating and getting feedback on requirements

- there's more, but off the top of my head that's all I can think of

Sure, I as a lead developer have business knowledge and can also do the job of business analysis, but a dedicated BA will be able to spend more time doing that - increasing their skills, and freeing up me to do other things. If I take on all of the above tasks in a decent-sized project, it's going to suck up a huge amount of my time - in many cases almost all of it - so then basically I'm just a BA with a different job title. BA's are great if you learn to understand the role and how it can help a team