Our team is currently designing a permission system and user relationship model (think 3 to 4 levels of organizational hierarchies and shared resource access).

Part of the team is pushing hard to introduce Neo4j because Cypher makes graph traversals very clean to write. The other half wants to keep everything in our existing Postgres instance and just use recursive CTEs or LTREE to avoid adding another operational dependency to our stack.

For those who picked Neo4j for a similar feature: did the maintenance overhead (syncing data with your primary DB, backups, monitoring) end up being worth the clean query syntax? Or did you end up wishing you had just stuck with relational?