Did you investigate any other network DBMSes? If so why did you find them inadequate?
After writing some 8 different backends for our store class and none being within an order of magnitude of our own prototype for the sorts of applications we're doing, it seemed more fruitful to round out our own application rather than continuing the seemingly endless recurse of possible data backends which ranged from mildly to amazingly disappointing.
If you've got something specific that you've worked with in the past that you think would be worth our while to evaluate, I'd consider investing the time to try it out. But just that there exist more options that we could evaluate at the moment doesn't necessarily imply that it's reasonable to keep writing new backends, which sometimes take a non-trivial amount of effort.
It's also important to note that Neo4j through the normal API is optimized for the most common use cases: reading data and transactional updates. Those operations are executed all the time during normal operation, whereas an import is typically done once at system bootstrap and then never again.
To ease migration, as part of our 1.0 release (June time frame) we will expose a new "batch injection" API that is faster for one-time imports of data sets. This is currently being developed. If you have feedback on how an API like that should behave, feel free to join the discussions on the list:
http://neo4j.org
-EE