Relational databases are designed around joins, and optimized to do them well. Unless you have a good reason not to use a normalized design, use a normalised design. jsonb and things like hstore are good for when you can't use a normalized data model, such as when the data model changes rapidly and is user defined. If you can model it relationally, model it relationally. If you can't, consider json etc.

Joins are not expensive. Who said it to you? As basically the whole concept of relational databases revolve around joins (from a practical point of view), these product are very good at joining. The normal way of thinking is starting with properly normalized structures and going into fancy denormalizations and similar stuff when the performance really needs it on the reading side. JSON(B) and hstore (and EAV) are good for data with unknown structure.