Hi Scot,
The common names synonyms file has proven useful for various people searches, and provides something you can just drop in, But as you say there are a lot of expansions in there and it won't work well in all cases.
When you use quotes you are effectively telling the search to treat the quoted set of words as a single word - so synonyms won't match these.
If you have a small data set it might be practical to curate your list of synonyms so that you only have the ones in there that make sense (for example you can pre-populate synonyms that you expect will be commonly used, then keep an eye on your search analytics (especially the report that shows queries where there weren't fully matching results) to see what words people are using and create synonyms based on this information.
Possibly not the answer you were seeking but hopefully there's something useful for you to use here.
