Actually this is *kinda* not true. One feature we added a while ago was the ability to turn off the default association bindings, by setting ‘foreignKey’ => false. Combine that with a custom ‘conditions’ property on the association (or just set up your own ‘finderQuery’ manually), and you can associate your data pretty much any way you can imagine.

“Cake doesn’t lend itself well to easily working with denormalized data as far as I can tell.”

Again, you can get this to work fine, it just takes a bit of extra effort. It’s nice when you can move this effort down to the database (i.e. cascading foreign key updates) but if not, you just have to write a little extra callback code.