I largely agree with your journey and your premise. However, I would add that I've seen just as many beast-of-a-thing SQL databases as NoSQL ones. In fact, any

I largely agree with your journey and your premise. However, I would add that I've seen just as many beast-of-a-thing SQL databases as NoSQL ones. In fact, anything I've seen at sufficient scale has lots of wrangling with their database. While your step 7 usually ends up with a better tech result, it's done at a time when the organization knows the problem domain much (much) better. They have real users. You'd probably get a similar result going from one SQL database to another.