I'm a Visual-Spatial thinker and am currently researching Graph Views.
Graph Views in Obsidian have very poor utility because so many nodes are displayed. When filters are applied, you can see things but have no features to do anything about it, so there is no way to create more notes and change connections. The Canvas feature can do this but won't help you intelligently build the Graph; it's very manual. Better Graphs are found in Anytype and Capacities.io, but the winners are Scrintal and Heptabase. For a visual-spatial thinker, Scrintal wins because it can build abstraction on abstraction, just like Tana. Heptabase is unable to go down further than one layer, but it does have a superior visual editing tool and a better text editor. Heptabase also uses Tags in a similar way to Tana so that it can make a good companion.
Where my brain is going, Tana is a near-perfect outliner. Developing graphical abilities will be a distraction when the development bandwidth is better spent elsewhere, such as integration! Now, if Tana could integrate with Heptabase or Scrintal, this would be better as both dev teams could focus on their core strengths rather than development functionality away from its core mission. For me Tana as your database at the heart of a productivity ecosystem sounds like a better option.
One key for making the Canvas useful a more algorithmic way is a "send to canvas" function from a query. We built this in our Roam query builder plugin:
It's very powerful because we query e.g. all the nodes that were made after a certain day, by an author, with type X (or relation Y to those nodes), and send them all to the canvas. The nodes and relations remain updated as you change them in the outliner, and you get the ability to sort, add, and include handwriting in a nonlinear way.
@David Oliver , if you have found other advantages of Scrintal, let me know and I'll see if we can include those features in our plugin prototype. We'd be interested in building something similar that works with Tana, if they meet us halfway with plugin type support :)