Why the frown? I've had success with Confluence at 4 or 5 companies. My biggest complaint is the handling of major revisions to a hierarchy of documents but that's something that's probably specific to me.
Confluence is a great fit for business and technical people in my experience.
Yeah slowness is definitely ":("-worthy, but in my experience Confluence performs pretty well. It really depends how it's installed and how the database is setup also.
And the search is weak, I agree, but I haven't experienced any significant problems in scaling or Jira integration. It's also much more pleasant to deal with than SharePoint.
For technical-only teams, I highly recommend MoinMoin. It takes some hands on administration (maybe it's better now, I haven't used it for a couple of years) but it was worth it for the flexibility, plug-ins, and the fact that it stored pages in plain text files.
:(