@Skye Hansen and @Heather Kulbacki -- thank you both for your very thorough responses. Apologies for my delay...it's been quite the last couple days. I'll try to hit everything:
Skye, your comment on point 1 re: the David's thread is close. However, I'm seeing teams that I'm on and teams that I'm not on. Either way, I own all teams in our system. And not seeing ones that I'm not on. If I were seeing only teams that I'm on, and/or own, and not ones that I'm not on (that's confusing...), then that would be that.
I've also upvoted your idea -- now I'll just have to figure out how to use it should it get implemented!
Re: point 2, Heather, thank you for submitting that ticket (often times I run into these issues and only have time to post in here to verify that I'm not the only one experiencing issues...and never get to submit tickets). Anyway, I've now lost two people from the view of my 'design team'. When I collapse the view, no one shows back up. Other teams that have more people on them, are missing more people, of course.
Re: point 3, I used accomplishments as a quick method to refer back to recent projects that were completed. In certain situations, that netted quicker results than using the search bar.
Anyway, thank you all for your quick and deep responses. One day I'll get more time to focus on the system admin part of my job

Brandon Hamm Bravo Group