payees and memos

[George & Rebekah Kalamoutsos]

I'm new to gnucash and new to open source.  I'm using the Mac OS X 10 platform.  I've used Microsoft Money, Quicken, and Simply Accounting and chose Gnucash because it seemed to do almost everything I needed without some of the clunkiness or data entry problems of the other programs.  If I am asking the following questions in the wrong forum/venue, someone please direct me elsewhere.

I am accustomed to generating reports based on payee.  As far as I can tell (from manuals, web searches, faqs, etc) the gnucash "description" field is where I would record my payee (and my memos) and there is no way then to search a specific payee across accounts.  Am I missing a field or option or report already in the program?  If not, can I request that payees be incorporated so that they can be searched, totaled over a time period, and recorded separate from transaction memos?  If I do will someone estimate their programming hours so I could donate appropriately if I thought the feature was worth the time/money value?

Thanks for your comments.
-Rebekah