Keeping a vision intact often does require absolutism. It's helpful to experiment, but in the end, I think a maintainer has to stick to his guns to keep anything from devolving into crap. Guidance from users is often stunningly wrong when taken from a higher vantage point. I hate to keep running back to Jobs, but if he listened to popular opinion and let them guide what he wanted, his products would end up reverting to the mean. Instead he keeps his door "solidly locked".

To implement search well is not a trivial task at all, and distracts from the much, much more important task of making the community self regulate towards quality. If all you want is a link to site:news.ycombinator.com, then a bookmark should be fine for you and others who do it frequently, and typing it in should be fine for those of us who search infrequently. No additional site complexity needed. If people ask how to search it, then they'll learn a neat and generally useful trick when someone tells them about site:xyz on Google.

Edit: And in response to "he should bring on more people if he's so time-limited", bringing on more people frequently causes more of a time drain than it solves.