After working with the eXist 1.4 RC again for a little while, I think it's pretty clear that the admin client has some serious bugs in the index configuration dialog; for one thing, whenever you create an index as "include", it shows up as "exclude" the next time you go to the dialog. Adding indexes and range indexes seems to result in any search queries which use "&=" or "|=" returning nothing at all; at other times, they seem to return results with some items tagged with <exist:match>, and other hits not tagged, which is very flaky.

I think the next step is to determine whether configuring indexes through the configuration files is going to work more reliably. It's possible that this is all caused by the admin client dialog, or by the client's unpredictable interaction with manually-specified indexes in the configuration files. Tomorrow I'll try adding a lot of index settings through config files.

I've also realized that to get the old full-text indexing behaviour, we now have to build eXist with Lucene enabled. This is obviously the first thing to try, because the old-style fulltext behaviour is what we really need to support our legacy projects. I didn't realize this wasn't built in by default, so a lot of our problems may come from that.