Hi Joel 
No need to mention team members here, they read the forum, and if those in charge of a feature miss something, others will pass the info if they think it’s needed
In this case, HAWK isn’t the person to mention anyway (see Sam Saffron and Sarah Hawk named Discourse Co-CEOs).
I tested the user directory search by custom field, and there is indeed room for improvement.
Among other things, special characters can make the search not return results when it should, the layout doesn’t have much room to show more columns, etc…
I think if changes have to be made, it would be starting from here, to have a cleaner and more reliable feature to work with.
I’ve made the team know about it! 