Sort by "album artist" instead of "artist (song artist)"

I have done a lot of digging and haven't found a satisfactory answer. Compelled by loss of space and support in my Zune, I decided to buy an iPod. I noticed that while iTunes allows sorting by "album artist" instead of "artist", there is no such feature on the iPod, which is the standard for Zune players. I read elsewhere that this feature has been implemented in the firmware of later i devices, but why not the older devices? iTunes is able to read the data, why not the player?

My question for people in the community is, is there some kind of workaround to this? Some program that will write the files to the iPod with the "album artist" data as "artist" data without changing the metadata of the actual file?