Oh that's a shame, I thought they might actually fix it. I like Sega, don't get me wrong, but it's odd to me that with so many items, especially considering the massive amount of cosmetics we don't even have yet, that they don't have a more solid search function than that. I do think the candidate list is a nice OPTIONAL function but requiring the exact item name is rather irritating.
I think personally if I was designing that UI, I would have left the candidate list in optionally so you could find a definitive list of item names, but allow partial searches. But I'd also put a checkbox under it for "exact match only" so you could search for say, a basewear item, but not include it's color variants if you didn't want to. Personally, I would really like the opposite myself, I'd like to be able to search for ALL copies of an item regardless of color, but such are things