Yes certainly. It's totally fine to place multiple config files there, I do as well. I split up my configs in the various outputs, inputs etc. It's just that logstash combines them to a single pipeline and does not run a pipeline per config file. Nginx doesn't run a webserver per config file either :).
It's certainly something that's unexpected and could be much better documented, but alas, I'm just a user :)
(and I do agree, your issue could have been handled much better, especially since it's not actually a bug)
Yeah, my point was more that they accepted my issue, but there's no action and there are more than 600+ other open issues. Seems Elastic is too busy branding and pushing breaking changes to their APIs.
I do sincerely appreciate your clarifications and comments on this one, though.
I have hopped on the logstash IRC at times to ask about some of this, though I guess not this exact item. In fact, there's a different (well-known issue) that the init script for logstash has the config path hard-coded: https://botbot.me/freenode/logstash/2015-11-17/?msg=54338903...
There's also the problem that logstash (and forwarder) doesn't seem to let me do anything useful with the file names. I could work around that, sure, but it would be nice to have meaningful file names (not the "ls." thing that LS uses). Syslog-ng, for comparison, gives you a lot of control of that.