This central Appender class has no documentation for any of its method.
It would be great to add some text describing under what circumstances/when it's supposed to be called.

Currently, for example, I think I'm being bitten too by LBGENERAL-42 so I wonder what the exact Lifecycle.close() call context is.

Seems like close is never called at JVM exit. This could be a possible use case, but I guess it would at least benefit a lot to have this context described in the contract of the interface,