I am working with a 20 table db (not including lookups and session management tables) based on surrogate keys and it sucks ass for discoverability. It also subverts data checking based on SQL REFERENCES. I think natural / composite keys should used to design the db and establish relationships, surrogate keys added only if necessary, and then auto-generated, just like one waits to denormalize until there is a real need.

I suspect the love of surrogate keys is just more MySQL bullshit pretending that classic SQL design is wrong merely because it is not implemented in that particular broken database.