>However, there are things about the current implementation of the list that make it hard to work with. By far primary amongst these, at least as far as I'm concerned, is the extreme difficulty of determining if a wish I might want to enter has already been made. This has resulted in countless duplicate or near-duplicate wishes being entered into the database.

The search at the top is used for that, among other things. This allows you to enter some words and search for items that have those words, etc. I can't think of a better way to handle it presently. That should serve for 95% of the requests in regards to that.