Before jumping right into my question. Allow me ramble a little in hopes of giving you a more compleat picture of my question.

As FileMaker broadens its platform and sophistication and we push the boundaries to make it do things a little differently than the founding fathers may have intended. What we do and how we do it becomes a major factor in the development of sound solutions. If we

In certain ways how you do this makes no difference what so ever, both configurations are part of the same "Contacts Table" structure. In the same way as you can implement a complete relational structure within the same file, you can also implement a flat stucture with multiple files.

What will matter is how each file is used. For example in a couple of image catalog sub-systems that I implmented I broke the display into one file, the image catalog data into another and the actual images into a third. I did this because most of the times where we made use of this only the image catalog data was used and the actual images and display calculations were just slowing things down. There were a couple of other reason, but they were all variations on this theme.

So it really comes down to some basics on how you will actually use and implement the system.

I would say to always start with the SIMPLEST solution and work from there. Once you have the plan layed out then start optmizing.