A regular venti with room, please

Ruth Walker muses about the "real regular" and the "new normal" and how the word regular, which “means, fundamentally, following a rule,” has changed to “the deli-counter equivalent of … ‘default setting.’" According to Walker, “normal is another word to describe a 'default setting,' although it has just a whiff of the clinical about it (‘Is that really normal?’).” She goes on to explain the origin of the word regular as “rooted in the carpenter's rule” and normal derived from norma, "the Latin word for a carpenter's square.”
Regular and normal, both denoting that something is done according to a rule or a norm, seem rather exchangeable then. However, there is also the term "normal school," which originated from the French école normale, a model school with model classrooms in which student teachers could learn teaching practices. This idea of normal as a model rather than simply a rule corresponds with The Online Etymological Dictionary's suggestion that normal may be related to the Greek word gnomon, meaning one who knows.
Nothing clinical about that. Instead, it gives something normal quite an advantage over something regular. Every knucklehead can follow a rule and do a regular job. Doing a normal or model job, on the other hand, requires knowledge of how it’s done best. Maybe that’s why any barista at Starbucks emits a draught of boredom whenever I order a regular coffee instead of one of their normal “handcrafted beverages.”