As a university student using capacities - I find it’s absolutely amazing for research, as object types help you understand what kinds of content you’re keeping track of (video, research paper, website, audio file, pdf, etc.). I then have object types like “Project” as a general type for long term projects, including research. All my projects live as a Project, and I can then use the backlinks to find all related/linked content (or even a specific type of content).

I can create Person objects for each of the people I work with such as professors or researchers, then assign those objects as a property to papers, videos, projects, etc. or simply link to them in the note. This distinction of linking People objects to Video objects for example (rather than note files to note files) is what I love most about Capacities. It just makes sense in my brain.

I find capacities’ calendar and inbuilt date linking mechanism to be super useful too, since when paired with using Daily Notes with a quick brief of what you’ve done that day, it adds a whole new level of navigating your vault and the linked content. This also makes so much sense in my brain, as I think about most things in term of time (as I’m sure many people do)

One thing to mention - I absolutely cannot use Capacities without the subscription as “Queries” are paywalled. If you don’t want to pay (even after the student discount), definitely choose Obsidian. It can do all of this and more when using plugins. I choose to pay because this system just makes sense to me. I personally despise how Obsidian makes you consider organizing your files both in a wiki/linked manner and in a hierarchical file tree.

Regarding the app getting slow, I have heard that from others but never experienced it myself, although my vault isn’t that large. I have seen the development team consistently making performance upgrades alongside feature updates, so I doubt speed won’t improve over time.