Hi Manifest0,
Firstoff: Welcome to Phex!
Your ideas sound useful, even though they aren't all easy to do...
searching by track/artist/album quite a bit of work (we need to implement metadata readout, etc.) and making new search the default raises the question where to put "direct connection" and "What's New?".
About filtering by country, you'll have to wait for our main dev to come back
Should be doable, though.
Have fun with Phex!
Arne
PS: How did you find Phex?