Just a question more than anything, but when there is a form view, lists of linkable entities has this quirk of not being able to see any additional details about the entity other than the name, which often leads to the wrong entity being linked (particularly when the names are identical).
Often users are linking things through the surrounding context on the record. “John Smith” isn’t particularly useful if there are twenty people of that name, but if they want “John Smith from Hawaii with the email address j.smith@****.net”, then that can be determined by drilling down deeper.
And yes, while a solution could be to include these fields in the name field, this is a hack which defeats the purpose and ruins the use of the name field elsewhere (e.g. report generation).
Don’t know if it’s on your radar to address, but worth mentioning.