[eru]

The relational normal forms are actually pretty practical.

But you are right that in practice you sometimes want to deviate from them. And then it is still useful to be aware of what the normal form of your database _would_ be, and how you are deviating.

Similarly to how sometimes you might want to manually unroll a loop in your code, and it's still useful to keep in mind conceptually how the original loop would have looked like.