That’s really disappointing. I had hoped that it wouldn’t be such a big lift to support both simultaneously.
To be clear: my understanding is that 2U currently has no stance on whether they’d want to use Algolia, and does not have interest in maintaining any such plugin. I’m curious if there are any other Algolia users out there who definitely would want to use it with Open edX.
I do think that there’s a lot of value in leaving the door open for other search engines of this style (Algolia, Typesense), both as a hedge against needing to move off someday and as a way to offer the choice of a more robust (albeit commercial) alternative for folks who are more risk averse. But yeah, I can’t justify doing extra work to make sure that extension point works well if it’s costly to do so and there’s literally nobody interested in running alternatives.
So I guess I await other comments on this thread. 
Do you think there are things we should be doing at the moment to better contain Meilisearch on the front and back end, to make an extension point easier to build later on?