iTunes Match troubles, overwriting metadata, sluggish program

I'm gonna try to be clear and brief, but with the amount of issues I've had in the last few months with Match it'll be difficult.

I've used Match on and off for the last few years, and most of the time I've found it to be a good idea when it's not being temperamental. In April, I chose to auto-renew it for another year. It wasn't more than a few days after that that I've gotten plagued with issues.

The multiple playlist thing: still hasn't been resolved outside of temporary fixes. I hold down Delete and wait for several minutes while thousands of copies go away. I'm still doing it with iTunes 12.2.

Purchased songs: I noticed the first problem after my Match renewal and then the upgrade to iTunes 12.1.2. I have about 5,000 songs bought from iTunes that I placed in the library I use for Match. After 12.1.2, many of my Purchased songs in Match went from Purchased to Matched, for no particular reason. Nothing I could do on my end could change them from Matched back to Purchased, and the reason it was important to me was, whether it's correct or not, I assumed that if the status was changed from Purchased to Matched, that those songs would count against me in the Match limits. (The Library I use for Match is about 20,000 songs and growing.) The only solution I found was downloading all of my Purchased music from the store again, which is a pain in the guess-what but was necessary. I also had no choice but to force my very specific metadata information onto the new downloads, which eventually I managed to do. But doing all that slowed down iTunes significantly, and iTunes (and Match) isn't all that fast in the best of times. (More on the Purchased Music in a second.)

With iTunes and Match progressing so slowly, even after emptying the cache, then repairing, deleting and reinstalling iTunes, all with no effect, I had no choice but to shut down iTunes Match, even though I just renewed it and spent more than a month trying to get the program to work both correctly and faster. I thought waiting for the next iTunes download might take care of the bugs. Alas, the next update was, you guessed it, iTunes 12.2.

Now, back to Purchased songs: I downloaded 12.2 in preparation to use iTunes Match with Apple Music. I tried to use iTunes Match again, and after figuring out the new set-up, found again that all my Purchased music was being listed as Matched. So I re-downloaded all the Purchased music again, and thought I'd have no trouble getting things to work a second time. But this time, when I tried to force the metadata onto the newly-downloaded Purchased songs, it first took the metadata and put it onto the new versions of my Purchased songs...then it deleted my old copy on its own along with the changes I had made.

The changes I had made included specific tags for Sort Artist I had spend too long a time setting up to my liking (last name first, first name last). And I had specific use for the Grouping section of each file, which I use to set up my smart playlists the way I wanted them. When I tried to update the new music with these specific bits of information, the data disappeared, and it was as if my Music Library was squeaky-clean the way Apple likes it. I only lost information for about 75 songs, because I still had an old back-up of my preferred Library, but I had to make a second back-up copy just to be safe going forward.

And iTunes 12.2 is so slow. Match freezes my laptop doing whatever it's doing, and can take several minutes if I even try to make one change to a song or delete it from my Library. I've read many threads on here and online looking for possible solutions, but nothing resembling my problems has come up much. I'm three months now into my latest iTunes Match deal, and I've not been able to use it at all. I feel ripped off this time for Match, and won't even consider trying Apple Music until something, ANYTHING can be done to fix Match's many, many issues.

I apologize for the length of the post here, but my issues here have added up over time, and I felt I had to be very specific in order to be clear. Anything anyone anywhere can come up with would be appreciated. I'd try Apple Support, but I feel like I talk to myself enough. Maybe we can get T.Swift to talk to Eddy Cue....