"Corporate overlords" isn't helpful. Lucene is what it is because of its wide adoption. That includes big, small, smart, and stupid organizations. I don't think that an infrastructure component like Lucene needs to be 'ahead of the curve'. It should aim to be widely adoptable. To me, that means moving to a new Java requirement after we observe it is semi-ubiquitous. If 1.8 offered some game-changing JVM feature that would allow a giant leap forward in Lucene, then that would be different. So far, all I see are some minor programming conveniences.
However, I'm just one very small scale committer, and I've consumed enough oxygen on this topic.
