Best practice for creating AutoPlaylists

[hdubnow]

I'm looking for recommendations on how to best structure AutoPlaylists. MMW, 5.0.4.2960, lifetime gold user.

Let me explain my situation.

I have greater than 40,000 songs in my database, and roughly 200 regular playlists. Every song I'll want to pick from to create the AutoPlaylists will be in one or more of those 200 playlists. The music is filed using the following format:

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D:\MP3 Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track #> <Title>

The <Artist> field includes the <Album Artist> and primary artists involved. So for example, Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus album will have the following data in the <Artist> field:

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Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Keith Emerson; Greg Lake; Carl Palmer

I created an AutoPlaylist that contains all of the music I want to select from called All Physical Playlists. I did this for simplicity since I want to create many AutoPlaylists, and selecting from multiple playlists would be a maintenance nightmare. I've already had a maintenance nightmare that I'm correcting here.

For example, I wanted to create an AutoPlaylist for Emerson, Lake & Palmer and related. Here is what I did for the Emerson, Lake & Palmer AutoPlaylist:

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Search: Music
Match All of the following criteria
    Playlist is All Physical Playlists 
    Match Any of the following criteria:
        Artist equals Emerson, Lake & Palmer
        Artist equals Keith Emerson
        Artist equals Greg Lake
        Artist equals Carl Palmer
        Artist equals Peter Sinfield
Sort by Date A-Z, Album A-Z

I would prefer not to have to create a nested condition. You've used a multiselect in Artist equals implying I can select more than one artist, but sometimes it lets me select more than one artist, sometimes only one. It drops one or more artists from the list, randomly selecting them. If it was supposed to only support one artist, why not use a radio button? Is this a UI bug?

Is what I did the recommended way to do this? Is there a better way that performs better, or maybe is recommended for other reasons?

Also, FYI, not that there is anything I think should be done, but during this major edit I've had a few MMW stack traces, though none where I can pinpoint a particular set of steps to reproduce, and I thoroughly confused MMA to the point it was in an infinite loop trying to update the library. I had to do the uninstall / delete the database / format the SD card / reinstall / resync shuffle (not completed yet).

Thanks in advance for reading through all of this. Hopefully it made sense.