There are different flavors of OWL nowadays. Some of them are especially dedicated to reason on huge volumes of data (polynomial algorithms), although they are

There are different flavors of OWL nowadays. Some of them are especially dedicated to reason on huge volumes of data (polynomial algorithms), although they are not very expressive. Some are more expressive, but don't scale very well. Some are incredibly expressive, but are undecidable, so you can only use them as a formal representation of a domain, not something you can reason from. The practice in the community is to choose a fragment of OWL/description logic that fits your needs. Different tools for different uses. In practice I'm especially fond of the simplest languages, just a little more expressive than a database schema or an UML class diagram, as they are easy to describe things with and yet very useful, with lots of efficient algorithms to infer new things.