specifically, I want to index everything (e.g. the who) with no stop word list. Is elastic search flexible enough and easy enough to change?
You can override default analyzer globally and turn off the stopword filter by adding these lines to your elasticsearch.yml:
index.analysis.analyzer.default:
type: custom
tokenizer: standard
filter: standard, lowercase
This will create a custom analyzer with the standard tokenizer and two filters: standard and lowercase. This way your custom analyzer will be identical to the standard analyzer but it will not use the stopword filter. Because it's named "default", elasticsearch will use it everywhere where analyzer is not explicitly set.