No idea what motivated the authors, but from my perspective, basically: yes.<p>I&#x27;ve been working with ES for years now. the query language changes about twice per year, things which used to be the only way to do things become deprecated. (see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elastic.co&#x2F;guide&#x2F;en&#x2F;elasticsearch&#x2F;reference&#x2F;current&#x2F;search-facets.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elastic.co&#x2F;guide&#x2F;en&#x2F;elasticsearch&#x2F;reference&#x2F;curr...</a> )<p>Even if you do understand 100% of the idiosyncrasies of elasticsearch, you still need to construct horrifically nested JSON to do meaningful queries... making it annoying to do in code, but mind wrenching to debug with curl.