[cheald]

ES clusters will fail on the loss of a single node if you aren't running any replicas on your shards, but that's not really ES's fault. I've occasionally had a node just wig out and need to be restarted, but that's like a once-a-year thing, and I'm working on a ~TB cluster that processes a ridiculous number of writes - this isn't an underworked cluster by any means. As long as your cluster discovery mechanism is set up properly, adding and removing nodes from the cluster is about as easy as it gets. I'm certainly not saying that your experience wasn't valid, but my own experience with it has been that it's remarkably easy to manage.

ES was pretty brittle in the pre-1.x days, but from 1.0 onward it's quite easy to work with. The logging is dense, but that's because it's thorough - a feature I really quite appreciate.