Dunno, I've had three node clusters running very stable for years. Which issues did you have that require a full team?
- No edge-case is thrown at them
- No part of the system is stressed ( software modules, OS,firmware, hardware )
- No plug is pulled
Crank the requests to 11 or import a billion rows of data with another billion relations and watch what happens. The main problem isn't the system refusing to serve a request or throwing "No soup for you!" errors, it's data corruption and/or wrong responses.
Now I work for a company whose log storage product has ES inside, and it seems to shit the bed more often than it should - again, could be bugs, could be running "clusters" of 1 or 2 instead of 3.