+1 to allow a pluggable TypeNamingStrategy (Gunnar Morling's suggestion), that's something that Infinispan's remote queries could use too (they actually do add a second type index, yet we encode an internal type as well which isn't useful at all for their purpse).

But I'm not following on what's the benefit to use the _meta field for this purpose. The Elasticsearch docs seem to imply that this field is stored but not searchable, and as I said we need to be able to filter on the type by adding a keyword based restriction.

So that means we'd need to both store the field in the _meta and in the normally searchable fields, which defeats the purpose of making anything smaller like the description of this JIRA suggests.