It always takes one of the gods to apply a patch. The fact that in this case the patch isn't as convenient for gods to apply doesn't actually prevent pmdev from producing a patch (which will not be a patch). (If I had recently seen a patch that had been tested on the pmdev test server, then I might further consider that difference, but I haven't.)

Yes, I think the search should immediately run in this case. Most title searches will finish with a single submit of Super Search and the resulting server load will still be less than that generated by the current search behavior.

Thanks for the pointers already provided. Thanks in advance if you produce something more concrete as well. I'm quite low on spare time but that usually changes at some point this month, so I might get around to updating Everything/HTML.pm with or without a more concrete patch then.