Currently, boosting on `copy_to` is misleading and does not work as originally specified in #4520. Instead of boosting just the terms from the origin field, it boosts the whole destination field. If two fields copy_to a third field, one with a boost of 2 and another with a boost of 3, all the terms in the third field end up with a boost of 6. This was not the intention.
The alternative: to store the boost in a payload for every term, results in poor performance and inflexibility. Instead, users should either (1) query the common field AND the field that requires boosting, or (2) the multi_match query will soon be able to perform term-centric cross-field matching that will allow per-field boosting at query time (coming in 1.1).