I am thinking of a pretty expensive product that we are currently using that is very similar to what you are describing. It has an old search/filter interface

I am thinking of a pretty expensive product that we are currently using that is very similar to what you are describing. It has an old search/filter interface that allowed filters on arbitrary fields, and indeed filtered results would sometimes take 10-30 seconds to display. Now it is being phased out in favor of new, prettier and faster interface, that only allows filters on some fields, and on top of that has a much lower limit on filtered results displayed. It does load a page of results on screen faster, but leads to never-ending frustration when trying to do anything useful: now, instead of filtering on what I actually want, I have to iteratively do a zillion filters on irrelevant items, trying to fit within the row limit, combine the output, and then filter that again manually, sometimes taking hours to do what is possible to do within minutes in the old version. On top of that, for a longest time an absolutely essential filter was hardcoded to be on in the "new" version, making the whole thing useless entirely :( The whole discussion reminds me of discussions of "feature creep" in products like Office. Indeed, most people use only ~20% of the features -- the problem is that these 20% are not the same for everyone.