Yes, they stripped everything down to go their new web-based interface I guess, and now it just seems like we are waiting for it to get back to the feature set we had. Even Export suffered it seemed like which used to be my favorite thing about Evernote. Exporting the entire database is harder now last time I checked.
Unfortunately I agree they will likely not give the "partial string search no matter where it exists in a word string" any effort anytime soon.
I have been looking at OneNote more and more with the way things are going, and may look for other options also.