I think that if you have a straight-up name field, you either end up being culturally obtuse or  also needing a bunch of parallel fields for various collation scenarios.  I think we can both agree than treating names is harder than most developers think, and the point of my advice was to get that pont across. As to the details of structured names, I definitely hear your rant. Sometimes I think e.g. TEI's treatment is absolute genius, and sometimes I think it's ludicrous over-engineering, and often I carry both thoughts at the very same time.