I agree completely about the inadequacy of the search.  In fact, it is discussed in the last paragraph of my response to the final question. That being said, I am more optimistic than ever before that we will see significant progress soon on the search front.  We are currently experimenting with eXist, and the preliminary results are promising.
 
We have long imagined that our laborious mark-up of texts would result in users being able to find and collocate texts from everywhere on the <em>Archive</em> according to complex sets of criteria.  But we're a long way from realizing the full grandeur of our dreams.