Putting together and composing queries in ES is error prone and I have grown quite allergic to libraries that just write off the query/filter API ES provides as "json blob lol lol".

You can lose massive amounts of time debugging a broken query in ES, due in no small part to a lack of an explicit spec.

To respond to the mis-aimed comment:

It's not about just beginning learning - it's a problem the moment you want to properly compose queries and not just have dumb templates.

I am not new to ES, I've been using it for years.

I understand wanting directness and the full breadth of the Elasticsearch API (thus moving away from Haystack), but not actually supporting anything in the API (which is the actual hard work, not wrapping an http-client) is problematic.

Are you referring to the drive to use more of a languages' built in operators to build queries, instead of my approach? I think the Mozilla library uses an approach like that.

http://elasticutils.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Yeah that looks to be closer to what I'd like, although it's still not type-safe.

Agreed. I had a rough time when I was first learning how to manually build queries as there are few examples of complex queries.