The dev's response to the "flame war" was the primary reason I switched full time to Nemo and never went back.
The user experiences are very different between the two features and trying to conflate them is a mistake in my opinion. since I use typehead to navigate the file manager quickly without touching the mouse, replacing it with a very slow recursive search made nautilus unusable to me. Even if the search was very fast, though, it would still be a good search but a bad navigation tool.
Luckily there are alternatives and Nemo is a great file manager.