OP, I doubt your suggestions are going to get the attention of Theymos, but I happen to agree with you about the search delay at least. I have no idea why it takes that long to be able to search for something else or correct a mistake made in the search field. That's been an annoyance to me quite a few times, and I don't have a clue why it is the way it is.
I think it's for safety reasons. Enable search without a time limit can easily cause server overload by which I do not mean ordinary users. without a time limit, the possibility of a DDoS attack would open up. Just imagine, every second an xxx number of searches and again, again...
logically there is a greater restriction for newbies, it is difficult to expect someone to flood the server with a larger number of hero accounts.