I forget when the feature was put in but the trade matching report made finding partners to trade with 100 times easier. I run that report every few weeks and cue up at least a half dozen trades with people I match with that have cards I see that I want. Before that I would look up a card I need and start clicking on the profiles of every person that had it, hoping to find enough matches to send an offer.
As far as trade counts, as I just mentioned, I'm guilty of cuing up a lot of trades. There are times I'll send trade offers and the # is over 1000 less than the current trade numbers. At most times I'll have 40 to 50 people selected that I want to send a trade offer to that I just haven't had time to put together yet (I like to make sure I have the cards in hand before sending the offer). There are times that by the time I'm ready to pull a trade together the other member turned off trading so I'll either leave it longer until they turn it back on or delete it.
On a different note, I just checked and we have a small number of matches if you want to send a trade offer my way. I'm open for any of the Topps cards you have from my want list.