The ones that did were usually from an academic background and might have had some side-track with robotics, industrial control software development or just plain theoretical studies.

I suppose it's not as much that nobody wants it, or nobody wants to know about it, but there is so much else to be known that it might not 'fit' when assembling study materials or in-house learning systems.

Maybe the best way to integrate control theory into the datacenter (or cloud) from an ops perspective would be starting out by getting some traction with control systems in general fist, just like a general software engineer might have had some software architecture and patterns for one or two semesters.