maxBoost controls “boosting”, an artificial process of supporting columns that are becoming irrelevant to help achieving distributed-ness etc. And the process is broken, you will be able to find Issues on Github from me about it.
Setting it to 1 effectively disables boosting (the computation is: newValue = columnValue*boostFactor; where boostFactor >=1 & <= maxBoost). Your swarming is “strange”, many common settings (eg NAB benchmarks) use boosting disabled.
OT: boosting should be either fixed or deprecated.