Having used EAV designs for well over a decade, I still haven't seen a good alternative for data driven systems that provides the flexibility of an EAV in dealing with adding new attributes and incorporating them into an organization's business rules. Yes, data typing of the attribute value is an issue, but so is the ongoing maintenance of adding columns to tables and updating SQL to incorporate those new columns and managing application versioning/rollout. I would love to have an alternative for EAV designs where new attributes are regularly added to an entity's definition.