1) the mods/admins had little to no say in the upgrade. Just want to remind everyone of that. It was needed due to technical issues we were having with the old software, unfortunately the alternative to stay on the old system would have likely resulted in more pain than getting on vB4 in it's early stages has been.
2) Yes the Search functionality is difficult and often results in less than complete or correct results. Yes, searching for "threads I have started" or "all posts by memeber" should be the simplest types of searches to get right - but the devil is often in the details as they say and there's probably a very very complex reason why a simple thing like that doesn't work. They don't let me dig under the hood of the software or database so I can only speculate.