However, I discovered that one can access the raw power of Spotlight's query functionality by using the Raw Query search attribute.

This Apple Developer Connection page explains all of the attributes you can query for, how to chain them together with binary ands, ors, etc.

After reading that document, I was able to construct my Raw Query search parameter:

(kMDItemContentCreationDate < $time.this_week(-2))

Now I wish I could save that search parameter, under some clever name and category, so I don't have to remember the code. Perhaps Spotlight 2.0 - or a third party developer opportunity.

Update:This has been written about before, at macgeekery.com, talking a bit about the mdls command to learn about the metadata associated with files. Good stuff (and predating my post by a little over a month.)

Useful if you litter your hard drive with shared searches - elsewise, an alias to ~/Library/Saved Searches works even better (as it doesn't mean a - possibly slow - spotlight search.)

I really wish there was more caching going on in Spotlight - using FNNotify() to "uncache" files/folders. Of course, I can see how Apple can't make certain applications will call this - especially Classic applications which were written before that particular call was available.

(Plus, every time there's caching going on, there's people/things fighting to make the cache useless.)