Many-to-many relationship: use associative table or delimited values in a column?

Question

Update 2009.04.24

The main point of my question is not developer confusion and what to do about it.

The point is to understand when delimite

Answer 1

My solution is to create an associative table as follows: This is confusing to the developers

Really? this is database 101, if this is confusing to them then maybe they need to step away from their wizard generated code and learn some basic DB normalization.

What you propose is the right solution!!