Context: My understanding is that historically Salesforce was built to manage Business-to-Business (B2B) contacts, and the idea that the data model would not be built for contacts without accounts makes sense; meaning semantically viewing a business as an account makes sense, at least to me - and people do business with people through businesses.
Issue: That said, clearly some domains are not naturally built on the concept of requiring a contact to have an account - and Salesforce is no longer just used to manage B2B contacts.
Is there a existing natural way to deal with contacts without accounts that would not require custom fields, reports, etc?
Reason I ask is because currently, it appears that aside from resulting in a somewhat awkward rendering of data, reports, etc. -- forcing individuals to have accounts is currently doubling data usage per entities that are individuals.