FWIW, it's failing with the default Elasticsearch install

I'm aware: I am using that too, and figured that the Maven plugin reconfigures ES to allow the singleton cluster when I had to debug it.

My doubt is just that either way, the user will have an error, and then will either already know how to reconfigure ES or google for it, and in each of these outcomes you'll likely end up reconfiguring ES.

So assuming that we fix HSEARCH-2213 I suspect having an ad-hoc option in Search is a bit redundant.

N.B. for a quick demo you can also start ES from our project invoking:
mvn elasticsearch:run
This must be run from the /elasticsearch module. CTRL+C to terminate it.