Hi Guys:
I know what SQLite, org-roam and multi-user RDBMSes are and I use all of these things at various levels. They are useful in many ways as you have pointed out and across time, we may consider optional integrations but one of the core design principles of Hyperbole is to work in all fairly current major versions of Emacs (today this is back to V27) on any display device and to not require any other external packages or C-compiled modules. Now we will add optional package support where useful as we have done for Treemacs, ace-window and org-rifle but never require such things to use all of Hyperbole's base functionality. We then know that all Emacs users can install Hyperbole and use it effectively without any external dependencies required, whether on a terminal or an old operating system or what have you. This is part of the value of Emacs, common capabilities across a wide spectrum of computing environments.
If I had my druthers, Hyperbole would ship pre-compiled as well since in the past the byte-compiled code was forward-compatible across many major Emacs versions, but this no longer seems to be the case to me and the Emacs package system requires byte-compilation at installation time anyway, so we have a bit less of a 'turn-key' system than desired.
Although we build Hyperbole so it can be highly customized and programmed, we know that many people are just looking for ready to use productivity improving packages, many more than want to hack on a package. Therefore, we focus our energies on delivering more and more value in that direction.
Org-roam is very capable for many people and we are not out to simply replicate it and slightly improve upon its behavior. We want to provide a simpler, more contained solution for people who like and use HyRolo and want a similar solution for note taking. Quick and easy-to-use where you can get in and out quickly, restoring your prior context rapidly, working with multiple file formats and usable wherever you use Emacs.
-- rsw