Regarding (1), maybe so. I haven’t changed any default options. I didn’t even know there was an option. Regarding (2), also maybe so. Again, I didn’t know it was an option. Regarding (3), I did know there was an ability to search by prefix, but it doesn’t really do me any good when all my documents are markdown–unless I’m missing something?
More importantly, none of that counts against either the value of searching by whole word or case sensitive. If I can’t search for a literal text string like “[TABLE]”, the ability to find it by whole word and case sensitive would be very handy.