[timanglade]

I already responded to this partly in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2764736 — We think the integration into a single deployment is in itself a big gain. Maintaining several of those infrastructures can be very painful, especially as your clusters grow large. Also, as mentioned, we’ve also already added several features on top of Lucene, and we’ll be adding more in the future.

[dcaylor]

Yes, thank you. Just after I posted my question here I realized that much of what I was wondering about was also answered in another post on the Cloudant blog: http://blog.cloudant.com/technical-look-at-cloudant-search/