While GraphQL certainly shares some attributes with OData, we believe it is substantially different enough from Data that we aren't simply repeating the same mistakes.

There are a number of differences, but two in particular are striking.

1) Is that the GraphQL language is built with product developers in mind. This is a subjective/qualitative judgement, but we believe that it's just a much more elegant language, and that it is a more powerful platform for tool-building. We hope to prove this out in the coming months as both we and the community build tooling atop the language and the introspection system. 2) GraphQL is more constrained. A OData service has to support a huge number of operations that make it more of a generic querying service, rather than a highly structured way to expose application logic. We agree with you that often cover too much and without adequate performance guarantees.

In terms of complexity on the server side, I think this is a really legitimate question. Our answer is that although there is complexity, it is generally incurred on a much smaller set of core and tool developers. The average product developer who will just need to expose a capability via a GraphQL type and then consume it on the client will not find the system overly complex.