Say I want to find a list of posts where John6565 mentions the word “obsidian”. He’s mentioned the word a lot in several threads, but as far as I can tell Discourse search results will only list the thread once regardless of how many posts if I search for @john6565 obsidian, equivalent to the “show results as threads” option in vbulletin. Any way to get “show results as posts” functionality?
This isn’t really an answer to your question, but you can search within a thread once you find it.
It doesn’t give you a list of all the posts across the message board all at once, so it doesn’t do what you’re asking, and it’s certainly a pain if you have to go thread-by-thread when there are many threads. But it’s doable with time and effort if you really had to do it.
I do like your proposal and think it would be a good feature.