Hehe, I thought I was the only one who would care about having more than 256 instrument slots (“256 is enough for anybody” 
). But in any case, becase the FF system is tied up with the tracker window, it looks like having more slots will be tricky to implement for the official release of V2.
BUT, I love your idea of a search in the instrument section (hey why not stick a search in the file section too?). I mentioned it earlier along with keyword searching (words are simply counted separately like Google, instead of as a phrase), and faster loading of VSTs.