I gave up on ES and never had use for Solr. I think the problems I had with ES was how the contractor set it up but the only search I have ever needed has been built with bare-naked ORM, even did a fulltext search using Postgres as a backend without an index, articles size from 10^3-10^5 characters. on the order of 10^5 articles, still finding a set of 10-20 articles containing 2-5 search terms within 1 second. This really surprised me since fulltext search in Postgres is supposed to be bad. I tried to find a bad case where the search would take forever since I thought I had the nightmare case on my hands, didn't.
uWSGI is a beast to learn but once you got the hang of it, nothing else will compare.
Postgres text search is really useful, but dedicated search servers still win when you need to start showing faceted results and more tuning of the scoring.
I strongly suggest the ES 2 day training course. I think it's called Core Elasticsearch. It dives deep into how ES works under the hood. It also provides a great overview of all the available features.
What I loved most about the course is that the presenters were extremely knowledgeable and gave great tips on how to manage your schema with ES and configure the clusters so that you don't encounter performance issues later on.
You can do some amazing things with ES, that you wouldn't necessary even know you could.
One example is the percolator[0], which can be used to slam new documents against existing queries and essentially classify the document based on search queries.
I'm sure. In my case the ES integration was botched and I didn't have time to learn a new piece of software to work out the kinks. It's been on my list of "tech-2-familiarize" but somehow never been exigent enough to pull the trigger on.
uWSGI is a beast to learn but once you got the hang of it, nothing else will compare.