DevOps is about collaboration between devs and ops towards building software and operating it efficiently to meet business needs. Traditionally building and operating were looked very differently but experience has taught us that features and stability cannot be achieved without understanding of how features were built and what needs to be done to run those features in production efficiently. In an ideal world, the same person should be able to build and operate systems in production however we don't live in an ideal world - traditionally there was a big divide between devs and ops, and in complex environments you can't learn to do everything yourself. Hence... DevOps.

There are multiple ways this can be achieved. This article is a good read to understand different models of implementation of DevOps culture - https://web.devopstopologies.com/

"DevOps is Ops with new tools. I went to DevOpsDays thinking DevOps means developers and operations merged into one team. I was wrong." - This is kind of right but not completely. DevOps is about bringing ops closer to dev teams by either merging ops or retraining devs to be able to be better at ops (there are more ways as indicated in the above article about DevOps topologies). The idea of doing ops with new tools is that these new tools help us with doing ops like we are building software. Many software development best practices, abstractions, architectures can be now applied to ops as well. This shift in doing ops with these tools which are a lot like other software development tools enable ops to come closer to devs and vice-verse. Here is a great talk by Mitchell Hashimoto (the creator of Terraform, Packer, Vagrant, Vault, etc.) that got me into DevOps - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTQQggVx4sI. This talk explains the use of tools with the backdrop of DevOps.

Other than these two things, your observation was spot on. I was not at the event but that's the story at most DevOps events.

I think software architecture will soon become an area of focus in DevOps circles as the right architecture also essential for achieving CI/CD, agility and DevOps.

Never the less, welcome to the world of DevOps. :)