I got an email from Apple's Discussion Board saying a user named Scratchy 78 did the same thing I did; got on the phone with Apple Support, spent several hours on the phone working on this, went through several different callers, and in the end the issue did not get resolved. Their reply to this thread seems to have been deleted, but I wanted to let you know that I did the same thing back in April. They promised to call me back that weekend once they had time to push a support ticket to the Music department, but I never received that call. I'm going to try again soon.
It's sad to see the Mac version of iTunes slowly degrade. It's been neglected for several years now. It's the Mac app I have the most issues with, which is unfortunate, because it's one of my most-used.
Good luck to anybody who's having the same issue are, we probably aren't going to see fixes any time soon.