No, the players have as much, if not more resposibility than the designers. Why are we relying on the designers to make rules against face-dribbling when players should have perfect sense not to do so themselves?
This is where your example becomes really obviously counter-intuitive. Face dribbling is
obviously harmful to the player and, not advantageous in any way to the team.
Playing a spellcaster like, as some like to say, a
douche, is
not harmful to the player, and is, in fact, quite advantageous to the team, or at least their goals in-game, if not their fun as players.
Which spells cause this is not always obvious, certainly not as obvious as face-dribbling.
Why
shouldn't it be a design issue? Why put something there if using it makes you a douchey player or a failure of a DM? If you want to houserule all over the place, fine, but why is someone getting paid to design stuff that's overpowered and broken (read: abusable)? I know a lot of that stuff is legacy, back from the days when spellcasters had actual balance baked right in.
Somewhere along the way though, people started arguing the wizard was broken because he could things like this any and every time it came up, often forgetting that D&D isn't played as one encounter per day and the wizard whose blown his all his spell allotment on these kind of things is going to get eaten by the grue on the other side of the door.
That wasn't the issue. Spellcasters in games where this was problematic didn't waste precious spell slots on this stuff. They used wands and scrolls - cheap and plentiful, no slots required.
This thread has already discussed why allowing such things in the first place is a bad idea, and I agree fully. However, all that potential is in the game to be used, and many, many,
many groups use it. Quite a few games are
all in, and there is nothing in any of the books to suggest that isn't the way the game was meant to be played. After all, why would a game company write books and then tell you not to use them? That makes no marketing sense.
So you're left to figure it out on your own. Fair enough, I guess. Having a good DM and a social contract not to play like a douche doesn't mean that there isn't a problem with the system, it means that you've found the problem and actively avoid it. It's still a solution, and if it works for you, a good one, but that doesn't change the nature of what it is.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all about the social contract and not being an asshat at the game table. Not everyone is, and sometimes it can't be helped, as I've argued before. Insisting that the problem is
entirely with the players is dodging the issue.