El Loro - what you are proposing then is a search facility that works?  That seems sensible.

Tooth Fairy, I posted my suggestion over on the Social Strata help forum and have had this reply from Brian Lenz, one of their software engineers.

The current behavior that you describe of only original posts being searched when using refine list is correct and intentional.  Since all the feature does is refine the list of topics/blogs, if we included replies in that search, it wouldn't be useful to include replies since the replies would not be highlighted in the list in any manner.

We do plan on adding a separate search feature in the future that will do exactly as you are requesting: allow searching of all posts, including replies, and listing each individual reply separately in the search results.

Hope that helps,

Brian

So that's great news

It looks according to the Social Strata help forum that work is continuing on this search facility. They hope to have something in place in the next but one update sometime at the end of February/beginning of March. The search parameters will look something like the advanced search facility in Google and this picture has been posted there. I do not know if this will be the same for Gagajoyjoy - but it could well be similar.