I've put a little more time into my small view indexer from the other day, and it seems even more promising now. The editor I made for it might give you some idea of the potential:

Since the view building is all being done in Java, I decided to toss in the list of available JSR-223-compliant scripting languages currently available. The scripting context is given a variable "doc" that's a DocumentWrapper class I wrote that implements Map to make its use a bit easier. For added fun, I baked in knowledge of serialized Java objects stored in the document's items:

Normally, the wrapper just returns the value of getItemValue(...), but when it encounters a MIME entity of type "application/x-java-serialized-object", it deserializes it and returns that instead, allowing for real structured data access.

I also realized that I don't have any reason to stick to only objects available in the stock JDK for index storage. Since using this will require extra Java code anyway, I may as well make my life easier and write my own "view entry" class. Once I get that sorted out, I can work on keeping the indexes updated with a server task, dealing with reader fields, and physical storage.

Hmm, maybe I should make myself an editor for normal views that looks like this one. It'd probably be a lot less hassle to deal with than the legacy one.