If anybody else will use it, please throw your hat into the ring.
General assumption: I think most people perceive the usefulness of a new feature when it is available and usable.
I happen to agree with you, actually. However what can and often does happen is that I listen to people, create a new feature then nobody ever comes back and says "Hey Vince, this is great!" (or, alternatively) "This is sort of what we 20 users were asking for but can you just change..." (or) "Pile of crap, try again" (Admittedly the last one might result in me getting a little annoyed).
It makes me think that I've wasted my time.
Bearing that in mind, and considering some of the things you've said, perhaps it'd be better to make some less "drastic" changes to the system to achieve effectively the same end result.
Here's what I'm thinking :
The existing functionality does nearly everything you'd want to do however it outputs the search results in a template. What if, instead, we modified list propertys to return the data as a serialized xml string containing the contents of the "$property_deets" variable. All you'd need to do is call the server via the usual search string and set some flag, let's call it "xml=1" and append it to the url.
So, we'd change the list propertys script to first set the content to xml. Then we could use simpleXML (which is on by default in, off the top of my head, php5.2) to serialize the property list array $property_deets. Then we tell it, instead of echoing the output, to echo the xml instead.
