Does anyone have general guidance when one should use one over the other? I know that when using Joomla Categories you eventually have site performance concerns as Joomla loads the categories. I know this can be resolved by adding more hardware resources, but I was wondering if this would be a time to use a Free Table instead of Joomla Categories. I'm currently building a website that will have several lists (one around 1300 items) that will be used to categorize the articles. Thanks in advance.
Joomla categories can show problems as it is a nested set with category hirearchy, but if you don't need that you could use select dynamic e.g. to show only categories to certain parent, this can be a simple query that won't affect performance.
Thanks!