iPod 5th Gen behaving weird

So, I have noticed a few troubling behaviors with my iPod 5th Gen and they are as follows:

1) Whenever I plug it in, it immediately starts updating and copying songs, despite not being synced to any computer. The tracks and amount of songs is always the same.

2) It will arbitrarily lose songs. The songs will show up in iTunes with a grey ! mark, with no rhyme or reason.

3) I frequently have to try several times to copy songs from my computers to my iPod.

4) Whenever I plug in my iPod, my last 6 purchases show up under the "music" tab as greyed out, despite being downloaded to the iPod using the iTunes app.

I have tried completely blowing away my iPod and starting from scratch as well as restoring from a known good backup and neither have mitigated these behaviors. The iPod is at the current iOS level.

At this point, I have resigned myself to just buying a new iPod but I am curious to see if anyone has any insight into what the devil has gotten into my iPod.