[Govannon]

> Some stuff may want data from across relations (who owns this thing, and what is their email), but that's pretty infrequent

That might be a shaky assumption. Speaking as someone who works on a CMS, content usually has an author, and people accessing that content might be interested in them.

[lotyrin]

Yeah, but in most of those cases, it's as easy as get the author based on a key from his content.

It's only when you want joins (e.g. give me all of the titles of all the content and their author's information at the same time) that things get hairy.

Agreed it's not always going to be true for many CMSes. I meant it as a particular CMS, not the general class of CMSes but didn't make that clear at all.