Is there a way to make a filtering/search function like "is all of" for "has taxonomy terms (with depth)"?

Note: I originally posted this question in the forums on July 22, 2013 but it seems there isn't an easy way to move a forum post to this issue queue, so I was advised to cross post it. Thank you for understanding.

Hello. I'm trying to create a table using Views to organize about 200 someodd people that we can sort with a variety of features. I'd like to use depth for better categorization of things we can tag the people with using a Vocabulary specifically structured for this purpose. For example, I might have some part of the taxonomy as such:

• Faculty
  • Part-time instructors
  • Full-time instructors
• Students
  • Graduate
  • Undergraduate
• College
  • Liberal Arts
  • • History
    • English
  • Engineering
  • Natural Science

On the page I'm building, we currently have two autocomplete "has taxonomy term" boxes--the first is with depth (so default is "is one of") and the second is not with depth (so the user can choose "is one of" "is all of" etc.). This allows, using the sample taxonomy above, a search such as:

"Faculty who are in History AND English" or "Faculty who are in History OR English" -- both work because the nodes being fed into the view will be tagged with something underneath "Faculty" (so the first box with depth picks them up) and would be tagged with a department such as History or English (thus picked up in the second box when that exact term is entered into the box).

However, we CANNOT yet search for "Faculty who are in Liberal Arts" or anything like that because the second box does not have depth, and we will be tagging by department, not college. Because of the amount of interdisciplinary work done at our department and the ways we will be organizing our people, we would greatly appreciate some sort of functionality to be able to do these searches without tagging each and every person with every level of depth in the taxonomy (otherwise why even have depth?).

I've searched for a tutorial but perhaps I don't know the way to phrase what I'm trying to do because nothing has turned up (literally 16 results in Google, including this post saying that Views is designed to not work this way for some PHP reason I don't quite understand). So, any help toward the right direction (using a certain module in addition to Views or instead of Views, using certain Views settings, etc.) would be much appreciated to be able to get the functionality we're looking for. It doesn't even have to be with two search boxes--I'm happy to find a way to cram a ton of drop down menus in there if that's literally the only way to do it. We just need to be able to filter in ways that doesn't turn up only "OR" results, but also "AND" results with multiple taxonomy terms.

Does this all make sense? I am happy to continue to clarify if someone has any insight at all toward the right direction.

I'm (now) hoping to have this figured out by February 2014 and I know that's kind of tight but if anyone knows a resource or has some tips to help me meet either of those goal it would be much appreciated and it would honestly really, really help our entire department as we continue to expand our reach and involvement.

Thank you in advance.