[jmcatani]

The major advantage of Relay/GraphQL seems to be if you have one monolithic data model for your entire codebase. You are in effect, binding your views directly to your backend. This is great if you are a company like Facebook with a single graph holding all data.

Sadly working as a consultant, using Relay as prescribed offers little use for me as I port from client to client with widely different data models. I am interested in maybe using Relay in parent React components to keep logical separation between my models and views.

[dbb01]

This is actually incorrect. The Relay/GraphQL folks explicitly call out the concept of directly exposing your persistence structure via GraphQL as detrimental. Instead, you simply describe what your business models are with GraphQL (regardless of how they're stored), just as you would with a REST api. GraphQL acts as an abstraction layer on top of your persistence. The key difference with GraphQL vs a REST API is that you don't have to commit specific endpoints that return specific models, the clients can simply pick and choose (within the confines of what your GraphQL schema allows).