The fields have values and text - you're getting the value but expecting the text

Yes, I thought the same. But when I did getText instead of getValue, I just got null.

Maybe "companyname" would work for you or if it's not a company but an individual "firstname" and "lastname"

I have been guilty of loading entire records just to get a couple of fields before

Yep, companyname works, thank you!

I'd like to see some performance metrics around record.load vs search.create for some use cases

If you're doing a search expecting many results I'd say (gut feeling/ logic?) search rather than load would be faster. If you know the id of the specific record lookupfields maybe be better, if it's multiple fields across one record then load I may outshine lookupfields.