[eluser]richthegeek[/eluser]
You are sacrificing efficiency of speed and size for ease of development...
Having every item in one table means that many rows will have lots of unused columns, and for the most part these all take up space for NULL values (often represented as a full bit string rather than simply a NULL string)
Similarly, this individual table will be very large and thus you won't be able to split it easily (it *is* possible) if/when required. Database loading is awesome, but traditionally only works when moving seperate tables to seperate db servers (or putting half on two, and so on).
With the universal table idea, you would be limited to simply maintaining a RAID-like array of databases, which is nowhere near as fast.
If you site does take off and you need to use database loading techniques, you could end up having to rewrite your code for the data retrieval (if you split your models from everything else properly its not the end of the world), but you might as well invest in a solid multi-table solution now to save hassle later.
