Hi @JeffSaxe, sorry for the delayed response on this.
You do have this right. In the existing 4.0 and 4.1 release, we require that you create identical indexes to get both HA and load balancing. In the case of cluster operations that add/remove nodes, we require that you recreate indexes after a node has been removed and added back in.
In future these will be simplified but for now, there is some additional overhead to managing GSI indexes. You can use View indexes (CREATE INDEX … USING VIEW) with N1QL if the management of GSI indexes is an issue for your production deployment. Views live in the data service and have automated replica, failover and rebalance management.
thanks
-cihan