Yes it certainly would. I have to admit that it's crossed my mind more than once. The set capabilities could lend itself very well to some high performance face

Yes it certainly would. I have to admit that it's crossed my mind more than once. The set capabilities could lend itself very well to some high performance faceting functionality, so you might end up with something between Lucene and Solr. There is definitely a use case for something like that - Sphinx does excel on large data sets, but there are a lot of people who know that they'll only ever need to be searching a few hundred megabytes of text anyway. You wouldn't want to use that for a scaling startup perhaps, but the world is larger than that...