Well, as it happens, my thought process is pretty close to what you have described above!
I wish I could give your post a 
a 
and a 
!!!
It’s a brilliant explanation of the process.
Maybe the only difference is that I tend to do my initial thinking ‘offline’ (with pen and paper) to save myself from creating dbs and relations which I might end up having to modify/delete.
But ultimately, every complex workspace I have ever set up has started out in much the same way.
My recent video about how to set up a workspace was an attempt to explain the initial process in a fairly simple way, and this video on helper dbs was hoped to go some way to build on that initial concept, so that people who got into Fibery would end up reaching the type of thinking you described above.
As it is, I know that people learn in different ways, so I deliberately kept each of the videos relatively short, to avoid making them to boring.