Hi, first post here, I hope I don’t break any rules… 
I’m new to Forex, but as a physicist and programmer I am always eager to tackle new problems.
My primary interest is in writing automatic traders for short term trades, taking advantage of small scale fluctuations over larger trends. Not necessarily short enough to be considered scalping, but probably having trades open for less than an hour each.
I have been practising both manual trading and writing/backtesting EAs with demo accounts on MT4 (Finotec) and MT5 (Alpari UK). However, I am starting to question whether either of these are in fact the correct choice. MT4 seems old and outdated, but MT5 has very poor take-up by brokers, which makes me question it’s viability as a long term choice. Also, I have been running in to a lot of missing data, even from recent weeks, although that may be just the brokers i’m using.
What I really need is:
To write trading robots in a sensible programming language
To test and optimise these robots with high quality historical tick data.
To run the robots on a demo account.
Ideally, to easily and efficiently give robots full access to recent tick data as they run.
Also, it would all be quite useless if the software I was using was limiting me to a poor quality broker who I wouldn’t want to take out a real account with when i’m ready.
Perhaps cTrader? or NinjaTrader?
P.S. I realise this question covers both software and brokers, I wasn’t sure which forum to post it in.