The official way of querying the Solr search core is a huge pain

It's super crappy: the current way is a giant hacking around the Query API where we use almost nothing as it's designed to. You have to go trough not typed and not fully documented binding hacks because Solr instance is not public... to end up as result with a Solr API that you have to cast in the first element of the result list

IMO this make Solr close to unusable from a component.

Just making SolrInstance (or a lighter version of SolrInstance) public would make thing much cleaner and easier to use in Java.