Quark Mass Hierarchy and Flavor Mixing

In view of the observed strong hierarchy of the quark and lepton masses and of the flavor mixing angles it is argued that the description of flavor mixing must take this into account. One particular interesting way to describe the flavor mixing, which, however, is not the one used today, emerges, which is best suited for models of quark mass matrices based on flavor symmetries. We conclude that the unitarity triangle important for $B$ physics should be close to or identical to a rectangular triangle. CP violation is maximal in this sense.