> Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter.

I share your ideal, but there exists a slight problem: no RDBMS I'm aware of really facilitates 6NF or DKNF (or even Codd's full relational concept; or newfound essentials like relational-division, and so on...).

There are also genuine ergonomic issues to contend with: pretty-much every RDBMS design and/or administration tool I've used in the past 20 years (SSMS, SSDT, DBeaver, MSAccess (lol), phpMyAdmin, etc) will present the database as a long, flat list of tables - often only in alphabetical order (if you're lucky, the tooling might let you group the tables into logical subfolders based on some kind of 2-part name scheme baked into the RDBMS (e.g. "schemas" in MSSQL).

...which starts being counterproductive when 6NF means you have a large number of tables that absolutely need to exist - but aren't really that significant alone by themselves; but they always need to remain accessible to the user of the tool (so they can't be completely hidden). So you'll turn to the Diagramming feature in your DB GUI, which gives you a broader 2D view of your DB where you can proximally group related objects together - instead of endlessly scrolling a long alphabetical list; and you can actually see FKs represented by physical connections which aids intuitive groking when you're mentally onboarding onto a huge, legacy production DB design.

...but DB diagrams are just too slow to load (as the tooling needs to read the entire DB's schema, design; all objects first before it can give you a useful view of everything - it's just so incredibly grating; whereas that alphabetical list loads instantly.

Sorry I'm just rambling now but anyway, my point is, 6NF is great, but our tooling sucks, and the RDBMS they connect to suck even more (e.g. SQL-92 defined the 4 main CONSTRAINT types seen in practically all RDBMS today (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and DEFAULT); over 30 years later we still have the same anaemic set of primitive constraints; only Postgres went further (with its `EXCEPT` constraint). As of 2026, and almost 40 years since it was defined, no RDBMS supports ASSERTION constraints; wither DOMAIN constraints and a unified type-system that elegantly mediates between named scalars, relations (unordered sets of tuples), queries, and DOMAINs and the rest.

...this situation is maddening to me because so many data-modelling problems exist _because_ of how unevolved our RDBMS are.