I feel like we're coming to a solution here in general, with the idea of everything having isotopic forms, specifically the idea that ACTION! isotopes are the only kind of action that executes implicitly.
It would then be isotopic ACTION! and isotopic TYPESET! that would have the weird behavior.
How would you make an isotopic action to pass to something like FIND? Well, the proposal is that action isotopes are the only things that execute. Hence:
foo: func [x] [print [x]] ; FUNC would return an ACTION! isotope
bar: x -> [print [x]] ; LAMBDA would return an ACTION! isotope
This means that simply defining a function in the slot where isotopic things are taken would fulfill the purpose.
>> find [1 2 3 4] func [x] [x > 2] ; pass isotopic function, so not using literally
== [3 4] ; one interpretation of the result (could also pass function a position)
>> find [1 2 3 4] meta func [x] [x > 2] ; search for the function *literally*
== [1 2 3 4] ; impossible to find that function in the block, you just created it
We could say that there is a term MATCHES which creates isotopic typesets from non-isotopic ones
>> find [1 2 "abc" 3 4] matches any-string!
== ["abc" 3 4]
Alternately, we could instead solve this by passing functions, e.g. generated by POINTFREE:
>> find [1 2 "abc" 3 4] (<- match any-string!)
== ["abc" 3 4]