In my experience, the answer to each of those questions is "sometimes yes, sometimes no." Our software does not exist in isolation. If I don't ask you to separ

In my experience, the answer to each of those questions is "sometimes yes, sometimes no." Our software does not exist in isolation. If I don't ask you to separate your first name and your last name, and a need comes up to interact with another software (or manual) system that requires the first and last name to be separate, you shift the problem. It will either not be possible to interact with such a system or I will need to make the decision in my system, which is worse than asking you to do it). In a perfect world I would snap my finger and all legacy systems, government forms, and legal requirements would be updated to eliminate some of the more arbitrary (by today's standards) limitations, and would use UTF-8 encoding to boot. In a less perfect world I will choose my battles and sometimes force people whose names don't conform to the more prevalent norms of western society (which is where my clients mostly do business) to compromise. But I will be mindful and hope of a better future.