Make Members the Views for user listings

I'm currently working on an Intranet for my company and the member list seems to be a very good option for creating a directory.
I really appreciate the simple way that it displays the user information in a table (with sort option, restriction by role), but, to be able to really work as a directory I'll need to add some more features and would like to get your opinion on them:

1/ more filters:
Filtering by roles works fine for displaying members list where role is a descriptive function for members like moderator, authors...
In my case I'd like to manage a user directory and role is not enough to describe them unless I start added a bunch of roles. Profile are very usefull in this case. I can set a profile field for country, branch, department...
So I think it would be very usefull to add support for such filtering and especially if I can combine profile fields.
Ex: I'd like to see all Sales people from the NY branch or all IT from Canada etc...

I think it's possible to add variables in the URL like &fid=2|IT,3|Canada of course this would work for "list selection" fields.

2/ search:
A big missing from profile module is the ability to search users profile fields. This of course affect members module. There's a bunch of patch for profile and also a module ProfilePlus but nothing is really working well.
I don't currently know how to deal with this. Adding a module like ProfilePlus is not very dificult but it means that search results (for users) will be displayed as normal drupal search and I'm not very fond of. I'd prefer members display. But this imply creating custom theme for this and as for today I didn't have a clue on how to achieve this (and not so much time).

Any thoughs ?
Now I think I'll work on 1/ but I'd like to gather some opinions on this.
I saw the patch to easily display role to restrict members #114466 but I'm not very convinced by the way of achieving this. Role selection through the URL is a great thing, but displaying role like this should be a theming option.
It's the same thing for my first point. I think I'll make it only available through the URL and then it'll be up to the webmaster to set it up (at least at the beginning). I though on making profile fields clickable (overloading the current clickable option) but I'm not sure if it'll be a good UI/idea.

For the search, well if you have any ideas on it... They're welcome.

Also I think I don't want to create another "user management" module, there's too many at this time.