Many thanks for your detailed response. I have no experience with AQL but the orient db devs say that they chose SQL because most developers were already familiar with it. Personally I would like the graph databases agree on one query language be it cypher, aql or gremlin.

When I was first looking into graph databases the different query languages caused a lot of confusion.

Your comments are very insightful but they have only made the decision harder for me :( One on hand I have invested some time into orient db and I think I am grasping concepts of it well on the other it seems that it requires some care. But my use case does not require bulk inserts so I guess I will stick with it for now and keep my eye on arango db.