Please don't (anyone) take the low number of complaints as an indication of a low level of unhappiness. Such misconceptions could eventually lead the powers that be to decide "search isn't worth it," and leave it off permanently. If a thread of "I want search back" followed-up by a few hundred "me too"s is necessary to dispel such misconceptions, I'll be happy to start one in several forums.

To me, the tradeoff isn't about the "small price to pay" of search vs. an inoperable board. The real tradeoff is search vs. whatever php security patch caused FT to become slow.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to fully analyze if the php "security threat" that indicated the upgrade was so severe as to warrant this substantial performance and functionality loss, so I'll leave that choice to the powers that be. But I do have some doubts. I do wonder if either downgrading to the old php or running the dev version that has fixed the issue would have been viable alternatives to disabling search for weeks.