Though I don't have deep expertise in Hadoop, I find this claim highly suspect. High-level APIs achieve user-friendliness by making decisions/assumptions about the way a lower-level API will be used. I would be very surprised if there was no use case for which your API does impose a trade-off vs. the low-level Hadoop API.
I feel much more confident using a high-level API if its author is up-front about what assumptions it's making. If the claim is that there is no trade-off vs. the low-level API, I generally conclude that the author doesn't understand the problem space well enough to know what those trade-offs are.
Though I don't have deep expertise in Hadoop, I find this claim highly suspect. High-level APIs achieve user-friendliness by making decisions/assumptions about the way a lower-level API will be used. I would be very surprised if there was no use case for which your API does impose a trade-off vs. the low-level Hadoop API.
I feel much more confident using a high-level API if its author is up-front about what assumptions it's making. If the claim is that there is no trade-off vs. the low-level API, I generally conclude that the author doesn't understand the problem space well enough to know what those trade-offs are.
I could be wrong, but this is my bias/experience.