I enjoy cypher, it's like you draw ASCII art to describe the path you want to match on and it gives you what you want. I was under the impression that with things like openCypher that cypher was becoming (if not was already) the main standard for interacting with a graph database (but I could be out of date). What are the better standards-based options you're referring to?
But then data validation everywhere; so for language-portable JSON-LD RDF validation there are many implementations of JSON Schema for fixed-shape JSON-LD messages, there's W3C SHACL Shapes and Constraints Language, and json-ld-schema is (JSON Schema + SHACL)
