This. ElasticSearch is one of only two pieces of Java (the other one being Flyway) that's so good we use it anyway. Not too bad anymore with Docker, it's a REST API after all.

In the end, ES really proved to be the least bad search server there's out there. The real crux isn't search, it's language. And as Lucene is made by technical linguists (a really rather special bunch) and Java is still universities' darling, it's unlikely their effort can be redone in a non-JVM language anytime soon.