Isn’t that schema actually the opposite of poor for SQLite, since it stores everything as text internally?

It employs "flexible typing", which does not mean "everything is text". What I am doing is writing fully denormalised text (strings) in most fields, with column type declared as TEXT.

This is deliberate, to emulate "whoops, if I screw up my types, how bad does it get?".

However, when written into the DB with some care, each value is stored per the following storage classes:

https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html

Quoting...

```

Each value stored in an SQLite database (or manipulated by the database engine) has one of the following storage classes:

    NULL. The value is a NULL value.

    INTEGER. The value is a signed integer, stored in 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 bytes depending on the magnitude of the value.

    REAL. The value is a floating point value, stored as an 8-byte IEEE floating point number.

    TEXT. The value is a text string, stored using the database encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE).

    BLOB. The value is a blob of data, stored exactly as it was input.

Any column in an SQLite version 3 database, except an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY column, may be used to store a value of any storage class.

All values in SQL statements, whether they are literals embedded in SQL statement text or parameters bound to precompiled SQL statements have an implicit storage class. Under circumstances described below, the database engine may convert values between numeric storage classes (INTEGER and REAL) and TEXT during query execution.

```

(edits: formatting, clarify what I'm doing v/s what SQLite does)