We're building an application on the Force.Com Platform as a Service (i.e. we're an ISV) and are in debate as to whether the Contact object is worth using, or whether we should rely only on purely custom objects.

 

From my Data Modelling experience I say that if the Contact object is a superset of all the attributes of our 'Contractor' object, then we should use Contacts with a custom record type of Contractor .My development team say no, this is too bloated and it would be better for their web services calls to simply have a custom object instead. The same goes for our Company object in our logical data model.

 

What's the general opinion on this, does using the standard Contacts and Accounts objects have benefits over using completely custom objects ? Other than the limits on Custom Objects/Fields/Relationships why else would you re-use them  ?

 

Discuss.