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Andrew, your assumption that Formidable creates relational database tables is incorrect. Both WordPress and Formidable use a metadata schema. Metadata schemas are not relational tables in the classic sense of database design. Please take a look at Formidable database schema to follow along with the explanation. https://formidableforms.com/knowledgebase/database-schema/
Relational databases store data in structured manner, organized in tables and columns and extended with constraints on the data—primary and unique constraints, foreign keys, check constraints or data types.
The metadata schema in WordPress/Formidable follows a 2-table design regardless of how many forms you create. When a user submits an entry, the two tables that are touched are frm_items and frm_item_metas. The frm_items table is the entry's header record. The frm_item_metas table stores the form's input data, one table row per field. If your form has 40 fields and all 40 are populated, when the user clicks submit, frm_items gets the header record and frm_item_metas gets 40 new table rows.
This is how a metadata schema works. If you examine the table indexes in PHPMyAdmin, you'll see primary keys only. There are no related foreign keys or cascading events. Therefore, these are not relational tables.
The SQL used for extracting data is built with a series of LEFT JOINS where each LEFT JOIN is is a connection back to the frm_item_metas table.
As for your shortcode idea, it's easy to build your own shortcodes. You can certainly do what you envision. There are many ways to improve performance with a metadata schema, but that's a tutorial unto itself. I regularly build relational schemas with flat tables that can be used with Formidable views and lookup fields. If I can do it, anyone can.