I spoke to Etsy Support yesterday and, even though I was pretty sure somebody must have told them already about this malfunction, I reported the issue. Today the problem is still there, so I imagine they are not spending a particular amount of time and effort trying to fix the problem. It seems like a pretty serious malfunction, the literal search function of the shopping app doesn't work well, I would imagine it's a top priority issue, but alas it seems it isn't.
But then again, there's another long standing bug by which if you bulk change prices, all the product photos of the affected listings become unbound, thus defeating the purpose of the function, which was to avoid users from having to go listing by listing changing things. Last time I checked was still there after a year, so I wouldn't hold my breath to seeing stuff fixed quickly.
