I used to work at a company that had dozens of SQL tables for similar data - if there was a selection box in their app there was a table to represent it. I had a very productive meeting with the young (CSLA-trained) programmers on my way out, saying that we could have a single table for all lookup values. The schema went from a giant, whiteboard-covering diagram to a neat 8.5x11 single sheet diagram, resulting in a lot of reused code and data. Maybe there's more than Things and Data in real life, but there is a pretty good medium between "new table for each thing" and "each thing is just another thing row"