The relational countercase is stronger than graph advocacy often admits. Foreign keys, junction tables, indexes, recursive common-table expressions, and mature cost-based optimizers can represent and query intricate networks. A graph engine introduces specialized languages, operational complexity, and possible traversal bottlenecks across partitions. The decisive criterion is not visual connectedness but query shape: unpredictable multi-hop exploration favors graphs, while stable transactions, broad scans, and numerical aggregation may favor relations.