FWIW, the ES team implemented a change that I requested via GitHub, and I’m just some guy who’s not even a paying customer. The change involved the behavior of force merge, and probably didn’t affect too many people. It’ll allow my employer (and hopefully some other companies) to make more efficient use of our disk space.

I’m really appreciative of the way they considered and then implemented my request.

I know someone who works at Elastic and it sounds like a really nice workplace (in terms of culture, average competency level across all employees, etc.), and that seems to be reflected in their products.

That's good to hear.

I'm not sure I regard that particular example as actually bad.

The response of "use the client version that matches the server version" seems perfectly fair.

elastic 5.x is ANCIENT and no one in their right mind should still use that for any production workload