The exclude options are just for filtering out null/nil and empty lists. I've run into issues where elasticsearch gets type conflicts when the first document with a field has either null or an empty array as the value for that field. Being able to specify the document path still makes sense with the new schema because I might want to grab something several layers deep, e.g., ["X","Y","Z"]. I could also see wanting to put different pieces of an event in different indicies. Damn, it looks like my description of the document_path has some typos. I'll fix those tomorrow.