Doesn't matter how duplicates happen, matters that we can MERGE them when it does.  Seriously, doing the right work is making them mergable. Just removing the barrier when I try to change customer X's info on one of their "extra" accounts could work...

It's been a couple of years, have your devs fixed this issue yet? It is a serious problem for us as well and frankly I'm tired of having to spend so much time on "working around" it.