Look, this will make the git history look funny, but trimming unnecessary depth from the source tree is a very necessary sanity-preserving measure when dealing with a super-modularized codebase like this one.
While it makes the project configuration a bit less conventional, it will save you several clicks every time you jump between modules. Which you'll do a lot, because it's *modul*ar. The src/main/java convention makes a lot of sense for a non-modular project though. This ain't that.
To avoid having to either hard-code or manually configure service addresses (possibly several dozen), and to reduce the project's dependency on docker to deal with routing and discovery, the option to use [Zookeeper](https://zookeeper.apache.org/) to manage services and discovery has been added.
A service registry interface was added, with a Zookeeper implementation and a basic implementation that only works on docker and hard-codes everything.
The last remaining REST service, the assistant-service, has been migrated to gRPC.
This also proved a good time to clear out primordial technical debt from the root of the codebase. The 'service-client' library has been taken behind the barn and given a last farewell. It's replaced by a small library for managing gRPC channels.
Since it's no longer used by anything, RxJava has been removed as a dependency from the project.
Although the current state seems reasonably stable, this is a work-in-progress commit.
... also move some common configuration into the root build.gradle-file.
Support for JDK21 in lombok is a bit sketchy at the moment, but it seems to work. This upgrade is kind of important as the new index construction really benefits from Arena based lifecycle control over off-heap memory.
