Thanks for merging this @zacharymorn . I am updating Elasticsearch to this change and I came to wonder if we should deprecate the static methods that create collectors. I do agree on exposing top docs collector managers and deprecating the createShared methods, but there are still scenarios in which users create collectors where collector managers are not needed, for instance situations where IndexSearcher#search is not even called.

I wanted to double check what folks are thinking around this. The plan isn't to deprecate direct usage of collectors, correct? I wonder if it is excessive to to now have to create a collector manager to get an instance of a collector manager as follows:

  @Deprecated
  public static TopScoreDocCollector create(int numHits, int totalHitsThreshold) {
    return new TopScoreDocCollectorManager(numHits, null, totalHitsThreshold, false).newCollector();
  }

This method is now deprecated in favour of interacting with Collector managers rather than collectors. I'd like to double check this we are all aligned on this direction.