This is probably a stupid topic, as I vaguely remember reading something about this earlier, but is there any way you can change the order search results are displayed? At the moment, they're shown via date in ascending order, and since it dosn't actually give you pages to jump to (another possible useful feature), and the most relevant results are most probably the most recent, plowing through a hundred different matches can/could be a rather large pain in the rear end.
And then just to point out a styling bug, in Opera, when you search then go to the advanced view, the placement of the next/previous links and save search form gets messed up.
All of the limitations you're talking about were done on purpose to speed up the search results. Sorting of the results on a 300,000+ db is over 100 times slower than not sorting - that's *with* an index on the date field.
Same thing with the next and previous links instead of a pagelist (like you get on the main discussion page). In order to get a pagelist, you need to get a count of the total number of records found in the search. This slows the search down immensely.