We already discussed it a while ago and we decided against it.

In certain countries, it's easier to download the zip than to use Maven to get the dependencies. People can also have issues using Maven: it was especially an issue when Central was not available on HTTPS as filtering proxies opened the jars and added something to it, thus changing the checksums.

As you can see here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate-search/ , it's still used. The downloads / week on 5.5.5.Final seems suspicious but the rest looks quite realistic to me.

Now that we have automated the release, I don't think it's such a burden to ensure it contains all the necessary files.