Thanks for the feedback everyone. I've attached the patch that we are now running in production to service our hstore include queries. We rebuilt the index to account for the on-disk incompatibility. I've submitted the patch to commitfest here:
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/patch_view?id=1203
Michael: I don't have a formal benchmark, but several of our worst queries went from 10-20 seconds per query down to 50-400 ms. These are numbers we've seen when testing real production queries against our production dataset with real world access patterns.
Oleg: Thanks for your thoughts on this change. As for the spgist / gin work you're doing, is there anything you need help with or are you still in the research phase? I'd love to help get something more robust merged into mainline if you think there's collaborative work to be done (even if it's only user testing).
Thanks,
Blake