To be completely fair, Apple has introduced a couple features in the smart playlist that removed my need to build nested playlists. I'm not saying that nested playlists are not needed but there are 'new' features that let me build a playlist without the need to reference another playlist. One of those features are "rules". As someone earlier suggested, rules let you do two things. One, they let you create a subset of conditions that are treated as one single condition in the parent. The second thing they do is actually very powerful; the ability to "include".
One of the reasons I HAD to build nested playlists in the first place was because playlists were initially built by exclusion. Statements that contain "not" or "does not contain' conditional statements. For example, 'Genre is not Trance'. You could not build a playlist by including genres.
Apparently now you CAN use "rules" to include genres. So I can create a "Rock" smart playlist that has a subset rule that says "any of the follow are true"; "Genre is Rock, Genre is Metal, Genre is Hard Rock (or you could say Genre contains Rock).
In any event, with much effort, I rebuilt my playlists with the rule features which replaced my original playlists that referenced other playlists. The rebuilt playlists actually served the same function. Now all my playlists are iCloud compliant and they actually function very well in the iCloud. (Another useful feature is "media kind" which helped limit playlists to music only or any number of other types of media. This alone helped eliminate nested playlists)
Having said that, I'm NOT happy that I had to spend several hours rebuilting my playlists using the added features to become compliant to Apple's "way" of doing things. It's very reminicent of the iphone antenna "you're holding it wrong" issue. In the end, I now have the exact same playlists (albeit, the logic behind them was changed) and they are iCloud compliant. Granted, I haven't figured out how to make Genius playlists work yet.
