I use quotes for exact phrases, when I see my results returning a lot of things out of the order of what I'm looking for.
I use (or used to use) + to strictly require a single word in my results, when I notice for some odd reason my results seemed to have skipped that word entirely. Conversely, and it appears this still works, I use - to strip out words that are clogging up my results.
I have always found that double quotes were good enough to specify inclusion and I did always use '-' to specify omission.
Thinking about that, I do now get your use case.
Can Google try and make + a double operator? We know that G+ only allows you to have your real names on your profiles and the '+' for G+ is to specify a person. Maybe Google will treat the '+' as a G+ only if it has a relevant profile to show and otherwise leave it like it is?
That actually seems like something that Google should be good at. In "The Plex", they talk at great length about the bigram/trigram problem (New vs. New York vs. New York Times) and the context of deciding when you're searching for a person versus a term.
I use (or used to use) + to strictly require a single word in my results, when I notice for some odd reason my results seemed to have skipped that word entirely. Conversely, and it appears this still works, I use - to strip out words that are clogging up my results.