I'm surprised by the poor quality of this discussion

Some of it may be my fault. My initial question didn't describe the problem at all, only contained the sample data. I thought it would be obvious what I was getting at, but apparently I was wrong.

Try to write that query with each schema

Jenda did indeed illustrate the differences between the designs with sample queries for each one. This is a good general technique, though, and probably deserves to be emphasized. I'll keep it in mind in the future.