How is that in any way a problem? You invoke these numbers but you don’t even attempt to do a calculation that indicates this should be considered problematic numbers.
Bill what are “searches”? Above you speak about fixed mutations, and now you mention “10^8 searches”? What is that?
You have already been cited papers that show novel enzyme functions evolved in less than 3000 bacterial generations. In some cases a few weeks to a few months is all it took for the bacteria to sample the sequence space in the vicinity of their existing enzymes and find mutants that conferred novel functions.
There is no capacity for this to happen in the LTEE, as there are no compounds in the media that wild-type E coli has not been exposed to before. It already has enzymes that can metabolize literally everything they encounter in the growth medium. The experiment was intentionally designed with maximum simplicity in mind to answer questions about the repeatability of evolution, and the long-term adaptability, not to answer questions about the evolution of novelty or under what conditions bacteria evolve new functions or greater complexity.
There have been other such experiments done, though on much shorter timescales than the LTEE. Again, you’ve been cited some of them, where (for example) novel enzymatic functions evolved within weeks or months.
Organisms with slower generation times have higher mutation rates and bigger genomes, and they do things like meiosis and sex(homologous recombination).