"1979 (I was one year old then)."

Well, we are roughly the same age then. Our is a cynical generation.

"One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy."

The cynic in me would say they were doing their job by the example I gave, which is just to provide easy test answers, after which there wasn't much reason to iterate on them. I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them.