Your article is very helpful and explains a lot. For which many thanks.
But the solutions you propose do not always apply. Let me give an example. My main interest is classical music, particularly choral and vocal music which I also perform.
I'm just loading into iTunes the Collector's Edition of Ralph Vaughan Williams - a set of 30CDs.
CD1, for instance is simple. It contains one complete work, A Sea Symphony. Loaded into iTunes it is the first playlist in a folder called RVW Collector's Edition, and saves as a complete album. Both playlist and album are named 1 - Sea Symphony.
But CD22 is just the opposite. It consists of 29 songs performed by 12 different performers or groups of performers. It shows as playlist 22 - Songs and Choral Folksongs. But you can guess how many albums it makes!
In some cases, several tracks have the same orchestra and conductor and different soloists.
I have about 600Gb of music in my iTunes folder [lives on a dedicated external drive] consisting of some 19,000 tracks. The main performers [choir / orchestra / conductor] are listed in the Artist field because when I loaded the first few albums into iTunes years ago, that's where Mr Apple put them. So for consistency I have continued that habit, and list the other performers, eg soloists under Album Artists.
I can't delete the names of the Album Artists - I often want to compare performances by different performers to help me learn and understand a work, to choose other recordings by those performers, or even to buy tickets for their concerts.
All I want to do is for ME to decide what tracks are included in a any given album. and NOT Mr Apple.
Yes, there has to be a default – but why can't EIHER Apple give us a "Custom Albam" option? Or maybe someone like Doug Adams [whose Applescripts for iTunes are part of my essential toolkit] write an app or script to do it?