If (by default) Nutch commands are going to send their output to a file named "hadoop.log", then it seems like the default location for this file should be the same location where Hadoop is putting its hadoop.log file (i.e., $HADOOP_LOG_DIR). Currently, if I set HADOOP_LOG_DIR to a special location (via hadoop-env.sh), this has no effect on where Nutch commands send their output.
Some would probably suggest that I could just set NUTCH_LOG_DIR to $HADOOP_LOG_DIR myself. I still think that it should be defaulted this way in the nutch script. However, I'm unaware of an elegant way to modify such Nutch environment variables anyway. The hadoop-env.sh file provides a convenient place to modify Hadoop environment variables, but doing the same for Nutch environment variables presumably requires you to modify .bash_profile or a similar user script file (which is the way I used to accomplish this kind of thing with Nutch 0.7).