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.