After spending a few hours with the documentation, I felt like I had a generally good feel for how you would interact with ES through curl, but then jumping into using the Ruby library there seemed to be a big leap and I felt like I needed to have a much more intimate knowledge of how ES worked to "get" it. A lot of guess and check before I figured out how to query properly. I've also been unsuccessful in figuring out how to implement accent folding. At this point I assume that this has something to do with "mapping", but I couldn't figure out where that was supposed to be set up (again, through the Ruby lib, but I was also unsure where to start to just accomplish that via curl…).
Who knows, maybe I just need to spend more time reading the docs, and maybe the information that I need is in there somewhere, but to me it felt incomplete or disorganized. I'd love to stop using Solr for document search, but making ES do things that I know how to do in Solr ended up being too time consuming.
I ended up feeling like I probably had to go to a training session to really get it, which is a shame…