It's OK to not like Solr. At the same time, half of the features I listed above, are quite new (SolrCloud, docValues, LTR, Config and Schema API, JSON support, etc).
And the other half - the 'old' part you may not like - are battle-tested, multiple-times speed-optimized pieces of code. Like this one: http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/03/lucenes-fuzzyquery-is... Moreover, their architecture makes very clear that they are making very similar choices, it is just their implementation is much fresher.
Sure, there is crud in Solr, it is an open-source product driven by the user needs. Sure, it is possible that - for some usecases - Java is disadvantage.
I would have loved that refreshed comparison to be in the article. It is very jarring that it was not. As it is, it felt that they walked away from 2015 and have not looked since. Even though their "simpler" approach did not work out and they had to throw it away.
They only mention Tika and Kafka, both I believe are written/using Java. I think the next article is supposed to give more details, I am looking forward to that.
