I suspect you read too much into my comment. I wasn't making a value judgment. If anything, I'm actually in favor of thinking no more than necessary to get high-quality results - but also no less than that.

> I'll play the devils advocate: what ever logical structure of the data you come up with will not line-up with relational DB tables

That contradicts my experience. The relational model isn't a panacea, but it lets me model most scenarios adequately. Whenever the relational model is deficient, what I want is more powerful schemas (sum and product tables, constraints spanning several tables, etc.), not less.

> Hell, we have been trying and failing to do Object-Relational Mapping for years now, and it's still a shit-show.

I'm inclined to think the problem is actually at the object-oriented end of the bridge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861520

> With NoSQL I'll just dump the new document structure and call it a day (or rather, deal with the differences in the application layer).

Correctly managing these differences without help from schema-aware tools is rather painful.