Search should return individuals + (households where individuals are members of households)

I've read:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/HouseHolding
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-1917

And looked elsewhere, but I have not found a feature/fix request for this.

Thought 1.8 includes significant improvements, it seems like there is still a problem with the household infrastructure. There is no way to search that intelligently avoids returning duplicate contacts (ie individuals A and B as well as the household Z of which they are both members). For mailing or (often) for phonebanking purposes, it is useful to retrieve one contact entity per physical location. Also described in the first link above as: "Scenario 2: If we enter the home primary location for individuals within a household and home prinary location for the household, then when the end user goes to search on the postal code, the search will return the household and the individuals within that household and the the end user ends up sending out multiple mails to the same place."

Without this sort of intelligent search, it seems like organizations are forced to create a household for every individual, resulting in many households that have only one member. To me, that seems like a lot of unnecessary duplication of data, when most of the databases I've worked with have only a minority of contacts that are actually in households.

Is this a feature request that has been considered and rejected? Is the "create households for everybody, even when the resulting household has only one member" model considered final for CiviCRM?