I don't know about your friend, but I'm happily using the latest version of Sparrow with no issues whatsoever, maybe he has some other unrelated problems...
I think 3NF is a good starting point, then as I said in another comment, you start profiling to find where expensive queries are coming into play and hurting your performance, then denormalize those issues away.
That's a process called de-normalisation, covered here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalisation You should only consider doing that after thorough profiling showing your joins are causing the performance loss.
I don't really see the benefits of this over the existing compiler. The changes sounds like they could be merged into the existing compiler as command line arguments with relative ease.
I'm not sure if I can see the correlation between the story being told and the fact that the author is female. It seems to be briefly mentioned in the first and last paragraphs.