The code giving a "lot of thought to software design" must be pretty good, because this looks like Java Graybeard garbage to me. Yeah, that's a caustic statement. I'm not trying to say that people who made it didn't do a good job, but the display is just.... Not good enough. They need to find a team member to help them get out of 20 years ago with this stuff. If anyone that is working on this reads this. That's my thought. I am not taking shots at your work. It does look well organized, but I cannot see a reason I would choose this.
What would you expect from a display to be good enough?
Just as a note, Orb is not there to compete with high volume graph visualizations like Cosmograph, Graphistry, Linkurious. It is more as a child from d3 and vis.js, which are great libraries, that uses d3 simulation and vis-like canvas rendering. We really liked what vis.js team did with the styling of the graph and how you can customize it - this is often a limitation for high volume graph visualizations.
We could also discuss about the analytics usability of seeing a graph with 1 billion nodes. It is definitely awesome, but it is too much data to grasp on as a user seeing it. Clustering or other graph algorithms would help. I think the question is: What is the maximum graph size (number of nodes/edges) when it becomes hard to get any useful visual information expect the graph global state? (e.g. seeing a bar chart with 365 columns (days) is harder to read than a bar chart with a smaller sampling, e.g. per week or month).
I don't know the answer to this, but maybe you will have due to your experience with graph visualizations.
You are right. This is a fine rendering layer for datasets of the right size. The space I exist in and am interested in demands a bit more. I think it's just a difference in scale. I do think the article is wrong though. I think we need more graph vis engines of all scales. I think the marketplace for them is just starting to be cracked and there is plenty of room.
Neo4j uses a fork of VisJS. They call it NeoVis. We didn't go that route because vis-network is tightly coupled and has a lot of calls to the browser window reference which doesn't work in a WebWorker environment. So simulations end up blocking the main thread.
Bait and switch blog posts (i.e that start potentially interesting and then half-way morph into a poorly disguised sales pitch) are so tiresome.