Checkpoint only allows specifying that all packages as they existed on a particular data in CRAN be downloaded and utilized within a project. This is limiting in that an R developer may want to utilize very specific versions of packages that span multiple epochs.
I would really like to see R develop functionality akin to Maven or SBT, such that an R developer can explicitly specify the exact versions of all dependencies, which will then be installed at the first run.
I disagree with you on the statement that Neo4j does not work well in life sciences. I am a data scientist building large scale systems for mining genomic data, and we built a fairly critical piece of that infrastructure around Neo4j. I actually presented an overview of that work at GraphConnect this week:
Many meaningful lineages in life sciences can be hundreds to thousands of levels deep (our datasets are great examples). Neo4j is the only graph database I have evaluated that handles traversals across lineages of this depth while still achieving the performance scalability promised by maintaining index-free adjacency across which ever node in the cluster a traversal is sent to.