Eh, not really. I've done both at considerable scale, and I don't hit these problems. Perhaps you need better developers? For sure, having your database enforce guardrails on what $thing should look like means your code can be lower quality, but you should pick the right tool for the job. For scenarios where I have one 'thing' that's not very relational, it works well. If your application dies because your $thing expects some field which isn't there, that's a you problem not a storage problem.