I worked on getting an address database into elasticsearch years ago when it was still using modified tf-idf. Customers wanted FTS where a lot of the queries would be something like "100 First Ave, NY" or "200 2nd St, MN".

It was one of the most fun projects I've worked on in my career so far. I got a learn a lot about how US and international addresses worked, so many edge cases, and got to really understand how customers were using the existing search to make sure they weren't adding any duplicates to the database. Token filters and synonyms were neat and figuring out the right indexing strategy was a lot of fun.

It was a lot more work to get it right for most of the use-cases our customers had than just "throw it into ES and be done". That would probably have been fine for the 80/20 case, like you said, but I agree that the bulk of the work is going to be fine-tuning the search solution, whatever technology you're using.