I don't understand: if everything worked as you wanted, would you create the index yourself or expect Hibernate Search to do it "lazily"?

I'll assume that you want to create it yourself, since lazy index creation is not a feature we intended to provide (even though it's probably possible to achieve it by abusing dynamic sharding).

Actually I did not think of your use case at all; to me the index would always be pre-existing, I assumed the purpose of the NONE strategy would primarily be to allow to circumvent issues with the VALIDATE strategy. In which case, being able to wait for the index to be ready (green or yellow) would be useful.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to start Hibernate Search before the underlying indexes even exist: there is currently no need for Hibernate Search to inspect the index when starting up, but this may change in the future... I would recommend to at least create the indexes before starting Hibernate Search, even if you only populate them after startup. But then it's your choice...
Anyway, regardless of whether it's a good idea or not, it seems a bit strange indeed that the "none" strategy means "do nothing except...".

It seems like a easy fix, I'll submit a PR and we'll see what others think about it. If everyone agrees, we'll merge it.