"Catch all Lookup tables are the bane of my life.

I've lost count of how many times I've had to write queries which join to the same lookup table 10 or more times to retrieve some basic data items."

Iv come across the same, This becomes worse if proper documentation is not present.

But having lookup tables has its own advantages, There are scenarios when u r dealing with a huge DB and if its not normalized atleast to the 2nd level u face loads of performance related problems especially with data retrieval.