My Apple Watch has stopped updating music plays for iTunes

My Apple Watch (SE, WatchOS 9.1)has recently stopped updating music plays for iTunes. I have playlists in iTunes (NOT Apple Music subscription) that are syned with my watch. When a song is played it drops to the bottom of the playlist. When my watch is then synced with my phone, the playlist is updated. (To be clear, the playlist is actually a subset of a much larger playlist. I have 5 playlists by genre, each of which keeps the 35 songs from my favorites list of over 10,000 songs which it has been the longest since I have listened to them). However, this has stopped working. When I listen to the music on a playlist on my watch during a run (so the phone is not linked to my watch), it does not note that the song was played. Suddenly, it has changed behavior as if the songs were never played.

I had recently updated to iOS 16 and Watch OS 9. For a couple of weeks everything was fine. The watch was updating the play counts and songs were dropping off the list as had happened for the 2 years I owned the watch. Then I started receiving notes that my watch was full. When I looked into this, it said that I had 2900 songs on my watch. This was utterly ridiculous, both because I have less than 200 songs, and because the watch will not let one put 2900 songs on it. After trying multiple things, I had to forget the watch on my phone (iPhone 12 max, iOS 16.1) and then repair it. This got rid of the bogus music count and watch full errors, but suddenly the apple watch was not updating the play counts - so that the songs that were played did not drop off the playlist. The only way to get this to happen is to play the song on my computer or phone, sync it with my match. I then tried deleting the music app and thus all music from my phone. I then restored the music app and all music to my phone. However, the problem has continued.

Any suggestions?

Sincerely,

Bret Hicks