I always thought our ticket-system was not very intuitive and kind of confusing when you start working with it and searching is a little tricky, too. But after reading your comments I take it all back! 
We have a system, where an email to a specific email-address creates a ticket or you can create one by hand (for the call-ins). We have different queues, for which you can subscribe, so you get an email when a new ticket gets moved there. And you can subscribe to tickets, too to get emails when they get updated etc.
Also I "follow" all the tickets I have worked an. There is a link on the dashboard of the ticket-system to the list of tickets I'm watching, so I can get to them fast (also the current number is shown in brackets, so I have kind of a counter, too). And on the dashboard I can see a list of ALL open tickets, one list of tickets in the queues I'm watching and one list of the tickets I'm watching directly (not matter the queues they're in).
I know from my start with the system, that it looks pretty complicated, but as with the new SCN... when you're done looking around and costumizing it to your needs, subscribed to your queues and get how to answer a ticket and close one, it's all good.
We even have some templates for answers on the tickets. And can email the user through his/her ticket etc. ^^
So... YAY for our ticket system! It's not perfect, but hearing about your troubles, it grows on me more and more. 