Okay, this will be my last comment in this thread because I don't have any new way of presenting this and checking this is not a good use of my time. This sche

Okay, this will be my last comment in this thread because I don't have any new way of presenting this and checking this is not a good use of my time. This schema is also in Boyce-Codd normal form. It's normalized in every usual sense of the word. Trivially so, even. It's not a question of being "technically" correct. If you think the second schema is more normalized than the first one, you need to re-evaluate your mental model of what normalization means. That's all there is to it.