I justify it to myself as “$HOME is different.” My fingers are also fast at typing it, and my brain is very well adjusted to “I am unprivileged” xor “I am root” - dev means vastly different things in those contexts, just as rm -r does.
In 1990's I used to have ~/dev in school's Sparcs running SunOS, as I needed some device files that weren't available in /dev. But I was able to mknod them.
I've been also toying with chroots quite a lot and there dev is also quite essential for its original purpose. Therefore "dev" is like a reserved keyword for me in *nix systems.
Personally I use ~/w (like "work") or ~/code mostly. I've had ~/dev once for storing projects, but I had to rename it as it was distracting (to me) :)
