[rohanpdes]

Not stupid at all. API cost (especially for writes) is indeed one of the main challenges of building for object storage. DBs mitigate this by aggressively caching reads and batching writes. There's a fundamental latency/cost tradeoff here - you accept higher latency to get enough batching to amortize PUT costs. This is a very reasonable tradeoff for search systems which typically aren't as latency sensitive.