The other comparison I'd make is to normalized vs. denormalized databases. Normalization has been pushed for decades to reduce anomalies that are not dissimila

The other comparison I'd make is to normalized vs. denormalized databases. Normalization has been pushed for decades to reduce anomalies that are not dissimilar from those that occur in copied-and-pasted code. Yeah, wonderful, but that same normalization can pose problems when the data gets sharded across many servers and even simple queries end up requiring many connections. Similarly, centralizing logic can become a problem when that logic becomes a contention point for competing patches etc. Sometimes you really are better off with several less general versions of the same thing instead of one highly general version.