At what point do you seperate things into different models?

Wow, that is a huge number of tables. My biggest site has about 20. What on earth do they need so many tables for?

We have 139 tables and 37 models in our app. The number tends to balloon after a few years of adding new features to the same project.

I've seen small companies have 200+. I myself am well over 100. 

When you have a site with a lot of role based micromanagement features on both user and user_group levels, things tend to escalate!

Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!