One-to-Many Relationship implementation

This is a question for the community on experience with one-to-many relationship implementation.

My experience with one-to-many relationships is primarily with cases where a foreign key is added to the destination class. For example in the case of a power pole with a transformer there may be 0, one or many transformers supported by the pole and the destination (transformer) class has a field [PoleID] that relates it to the origin (pole) class.

Another way to do this is to introduce a relationship table that has the ObjectIDs of both pole and transformer features. If the relationship is “attributed” then such a table would be necessary, but if its not attributed, then are there benefits to this implementation over using a simple foreign key? On the other hand, are there cons to this approach? For example, is there a performance impact, or does it many versioning conflict resolution difficult?

For what its worth my experience with many-to-many relationships, which clearly require introduction of a relationship table, it that performance within ArcMap is quite slow.

Any observations would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Ed