Id love op's idea, its just what we need!

About party search, yup, you can find a party.
About shouting: you can do far more than find a party, for example, if i am in limsa, and i want to buy a crab bow, i shout out, and suddenly a guy from gridania which just made one whispers me a price. Or if i need someone to put materia on for me etc. and just for your information, uldah is not a pretty city, limsa and gridania is, but only place to find stuff is in uldah, but i dont want to be in uldah, see the point?

The search feature is ok enough i guess, but if you dont want to wait for 3 hours at a time, you shout. 90% of the time, you dont know that you want to do an ifrit party before you actually see the shout, this making the search option pretty useless, and making the dungeon finder tool far superior in that point.