How exactly is the PERSONAL_DATA table populated these days?

A user has requested that I create a view based on a query he had written in the query tool.  A good bit of the data in the query is being retrieved from the delivered SCC_PERDATA_QVW view.  When I looked at the SQL for that view's record definition, I saw that it was retrieving data from PERSONAL_DATA.

I've been a PeopleSoft developer long enough to recall when PERSONAL_DATA was an actual transaction table, and the resistance they met with when they tried to get rid of it after splitting it into several tables to normalize the data it held (mainly because so many user-developed queries were built around it).