Anyone know of a way to stop these obnoxious and misleading non-refundable results when doing searches?

Its becoming more and more common that I get a list of hotels for a city/destination and the pricing ends up all being too good to be true, because the results show the crap of 'rate from' and then when I have to click again to expand it, it shows that price is prepaid NCNR and then the next 'normal' non prepay price is significantly higher for that hotel... more so than other hotels I end up booking at that either don't have the prepaid nonrefundable.

Really annoys me and makes the whole booking experience much more frustrating and a waste of time as I have to look at multiple properties and dig down into the various room types and prices to find if it is misleading or not.

I agree, but one problem is that cancellation policies can be all over the place, even for the same property. 1 day before, 3 days before, prepay first but still refundable, etc. Recently I saw a rate that was cancellable up until 14 days before. In some situations that might be just as good as refundable, in some situations that completely negates the purpose.