i think i understand the arguments against it, but i think im still on team "would prefer functional search"
i know documentation is a different use case than socializing, but twitter search was often pretty useful for rapidly aggregating private lists of users who had been present at an event in order to archive timestamped documentation etc.
as things currently stand, that functionality seems pretty close to impossible on masto, unless everyone happens to land on the same hashtag.
ppl can get pretty clever about meta-threads for organizing the stuff they are presenting, which is a skillset i always love to develop & see being developed, but that's still a little different.