Avoiding content-type overkill: 5 slightly different pages = 5 different content types? My drupal 7 site mainly consists of a main menu with 5 entries, each linking to a more or less simple page. These 5 pages have a lot of common fields, simply some fields are slightly different. Normally, i would have to create a content type and an actual node to accomplish this — but since there is only one actual node for each of the content types, it feels like an overkill to me.
One alternative is to handle all fields in one singe node, separating the 5 areas in the edit-form by fieldgroup-tabs, and generate the pages with views …
Downside of this approach: instead of using display suite to do the theming, i would have to theme using views-fields, which is a pain.

The node field module, which allows you to add custom extra fields to single drupal nodes doesn’t work for me, since i am using entity-reference fields, which aren’t supported.

So what’s your best practice?

(Annotation: The content isn't very often updated and the content of the fields hasn't to be used in tokens, but i have to use a more or less "rigid" field structure in order to make editing content an easy no-brainer for the content maintainers. using „wide open“ WYSIWYG textareas isn’t a way to go, because maintainers will alternate often and will have only little knowledge about the project.)
Answer is it depends.

How often is the content in these nodes being updated? Does the content in the different fields need to be used in tokens, views, etc?

If it's never updated OR if you can use wysiwyg to edit the body to position things where they need to go and make it easily editable then use one node type.

If the info needs to be put into fields so views/tokens can pull bits out of the nodes then creating fields for those values is important.