At this point Elastic is a lot more than a wrapper around Lucene/Solr as they have acquired many companies to build out their product offerings. That isn't necessarily a good thing, in my opinion they need to trim down their product from a hodgepodge of APIs to something that can be more easily put to use. The amount of work involved with getting something useful out is about the same that it would take to build a custom solution off Lucene/Solr.