I see that since version 8.4 you have disabled the search for files directly from the search on the main page (SONAR-13291). Do you plan to activate it again or give the user the possibility to choose?
For my team it is an essential option and we have spent years in version 7.9 for that reason.
This feature is probably gone for good – we found that there were not many users who took advantage of this (usually users would start with a project, and then search for a file), and it had a significant performance impact (slowing down upgrades, corrupted index recovery, or platform restoration).
What about it made it so essential to your team? Maybe you can describe the workflow that made it an essential feature.
In my team we have many projects that share files and sometimes they are shared temporarily. For engineers it is easier to search for the specific file than to know which projects it belongs to.