Quick search delay is not working

The reworked search box is actually harder to work with because of the large delays we experience when working with it.
1. The delay for making the AJAX requests is not working. As you can see in the screenshot in New Picture (4), a request is pushed to the server for each keystroke, even when the letters are typed in quick succession. Even after increasing delay to 2000 in templates/CRM/common/Navigation.tpl:72, requests are still made right away.
This is also documented here: CRM-7270
2. There are several handlers that kick in when I press enter inside the search box. See the request summary in search_box_press_enter.png. In my opinion there should be no more interactive requests at this point and it should just redirect you to the search results right away. Single result handling should be done server-side when the search result list is prepared for displaying to the user. There is some FIXME code in Navigation.tpl that should probably be reviewed.

We have 10,000+ contacts and the CRM is running inside a fairly large WP on a fairly small server, so you can see that in our case we are talking about 10+ seconds to get to the search results page because of all the requests that get queued. Our setup is not ideal (and the canceled requests are probably not closed on the server properly), but I would not be suprised if this causes major pains for other users too.
Thanks.