Counting House ... flipping over each card in my discard pile....
Huh? I don't understand this. The cards in your discard pile are already face up, and you just look through them and pull out the Coppers. If I'm playing IRL, I'll put all the Coppers on top of my discard pile, rules be damned.
The "don't look through your discard pile" rule exists so that you don't waste everybody else's time looking through your discard pile. In my real-life games, we generally just let you look through your discard pile when it's not your turn. If someone were trying to abuse that, with say Wishing Well, that would be a problem. But so far nobody has.
As for Philosopher's Stone, yeah it takes too long to count. I'm still sore that one year I got to create boards for some tournament that Rio Grande was running, and I spent a long time tweaking the perfect P.Stone board. It didn't have +Buy you see! So once you'd counted high enough that you had $8 with the rest in your hand, you could just stop counting. But then they took P.Stone out of that board for the tournament. Jerks.