Forward or backward?

Recently I was assigned to a project. Actually, the project itself is pretty simple in terms of business logic. There are only 4 screens which need to be maintained on the front-end web pages. The maintenance is also pretty straightforward. Users just want to insert, update, delete or get a report on the data. What about the data? The data itself is relatively static as well. Till now, everybody would think this project is easy to be done and the data would be easy to be manipulated. I could think it's enough to have up to 4 or 5 tables out there in the database.

Wrong! The data model designed by somebody is extremely complicated. There are tens of tables in the database to support his idea and backup the front-end interface. This guy seems to live in a perfect world. He wants everything to be flexible. He wants users to control which table columns to be displayed on the web interface. He wants everything to be stored as their IDs rather than their real values. To find the real value, I need to come down 3 or more tables to fetch it. I could think even the simplest SQL needs to join 5 or more tables to get what we want. This guy wants to build a RDBMS system instead of an application on top of the Oracle RDBMS!

Yes, he can say the model is very flexible. Users can control almost everything even the data type and some constraints. But the price we pay here is a hard-to-understand data model(sometimes even the designer himself has no idea what he's doing during project meetings, funny!), the inevitable database performance overhead and the unnecessary flexibility. Users may not want those flexibilities we introduce to them at all! Actually, He complicates things completely!

I've been thinking about this. The database technology has been emerging for decades. From the layered database to the networking database to the relational database to the object-oriented database. One of the most important goals is to simplify the data model as much as possible so that developers can focus on the real business logic instead of the complicated data model. We do ours and you do yours! In this project, everything seems inversed! Instead of putting our effort to enforcing the business logic, we have to spend 90% of the project time to understand the data model, manipulate the data to stay consistent with one another. Is it really worth doing all of these? Are we going forward or backward? Time will tell!