I think the common problem with the system is that people don't want to understand it.

I'm not saying that we should be content with what we have now, And I think we should use this thread to constructively contribute ideas and complaints since it is climbing in page count.

While I pretty much understood the system and all the buttons as soon as i saw it, it seems the party menu is just intimidating to people rather than broken. One of the things that does not exist in this game that FFXI had is the classic JRPG "Help!" bar, which scrolled by the description of everything you put your cursor on. That along with the visual additions that I've added would greatly improve not only understanding of the party search function, but would also raise awareness and lower the intimidation factor of the game and function.