I see your point. OO programmers who don't understand the relational model want to 'force' the database to deal with objects and there the impedance mismatch.

I see your point. OO programmers who don't understand the relational model want to 'force' the database to deal with objects and there the impedance mismatch. In that case Relational Objects Database might be a better model. Let the database store the whole object as an entity, an as the system evolves it can be 'normalized' to more atomic sub-objects giving the programmer time to grasp the relational model. For simple systems like a contact list, a contact object would suffice, even if it has many phones or many addresses. Get one contact, put one contact. The more complex it evolves the need to change the schema to make it easier to maintain and to avoid redundancy while keeping data integrity. In the end, a complex system would deconstruct complex objects into simple atomic objects (data) related to each other with simple rules.