Want Expert Opinion On A Way Of Storing 'relations'

i've a database where relations are hold in a special way which the project
leaders think of as "performant and uncomplicated" but which is very
questionable to me:
------------------------------------------------
Table [Attributes]
Fields [AttributeID] and [AttributeText]

Table [Objects]
Fields object stuff.... and [AttributeIDs] (varchar with 0-20 ids usually)

in AttributeIDs there is a backslash separted list of Attribute-IDs like
'3412278'
so to get 20 object with a special attribute (which we need often) we do

SELECT TOP 20 *
FROM Objects
INNER JOIN Attributes
ON (Objects.AttributeIDs LIKE ('%' + (CAST AttributeID AS varchar) + '\%'))
ORDER BY ObjectText

ps: to store data we need for communication we include a dozen of fields in
*every* table and its content makes about 100 bytes/record
------------------------------------------------
i would do this stuff with a table to store the object/attribute
correlations.

could someone tell me if that stuff makes any sense to an expert and how to
valuate it in regard of performance(we have big customers where that *is* an
issue), design, scalability, pragmatism and sense ;)

thanks in advance,
ViperDK