+1 for Flint’s proposal.
There is no need to “internally” escape the selected text.
1. when no text selected, Ctrl+F3 finds the next exact word at cursor, so turn off regex and escape sequence, turn on search only word.
2. if text selected, Ctrl+F3 finds the selection, just turn off regex and escape sequence.
3. Ctrl+F will always use the word at cursor or the selected text, with options unchanged. Ctrl+F in 10.0.8 works just fine.
IMHO the current implementation of Ctrl+F3 is not “wrong”, but not “smart” enough :-)