One thing that has worked well for me is that I'm a Last.fm user and I "scrobble" my iTunes plays (including iPhone plays that show in iTunes) to the site. I have the Last.fm Scrobbler app set to ask me each time I want to load my plays to the site, so anytime I see a weird play count over 1 or play counts being updated from songs I haven't played since my last sync I'll know to correct them. I had been resetting the plays and just playing the tracks enough times but that was too tedious. I'm not a programmer type of mind myself, but as others have stated there are some great scripts available that will allow one to manually change plays. That combined with Last.fm scrobbling has allowed me to maintain the integrity of my play count data (albeit with some extra work).
http://kalebgrace.com/code/itunes/scripts/play_count_-_change_selected.vbs
If you save that file (you can also just highlight the text and enter it into Notepad and save as a .vbs file) you can then highlight tracks and adjust them up or down whatever amount of plays.
I'm very annoyed and frustrated with Apple right now for having not corrected this bug with iOS 8.0.2 or 8.1, but I wanted to make sure to share what I'm doing to maintain the integrity of my play counts. From what I've been able to gather, the method of deleting all music and then re-syncing each time does seem to help to a degree, but it doesn't completely solve the problem. I would suggest as many people as possible to call Apple customer support so they recognize this as a known issue worth fixing.