We bumped into a
similar issue for SmartEject.
A regular expression search doesn't use the remove punctuation code, so if you instead search:
authors:~tonelli, you shouldn't get "Bret Easton Ellis" anymore. But then you may have to learn some regexp.
I was going to comment that the change for
1969926 should be optional, but then I saw it already is!
Checkbox: Preferences > Searching > Unaccented characters match accented characters and punctuation is ignored
Unchecking that make spaces work as expected again, but at the cost of not matching accented/punc.