HomePod won't play music

I have been having one-to-one support from Apple to try to resolve this for nearly 3 weeks now. It seems that if you want to keep your original music files and are not prepared to replace them with Apple's own server versions, iTunes Match will not work with HomePod. Apple support have tried but given up - they now tell me that this is a 'feature' of the product - rather than the profound limitation it is. Along the way I have had to set up test accounts, backup and delete my entire library of around 70,000 songs and lost some lossless files along the way in place of Apple's lower res versions. I've had HomePod refuse to acknowledge any verbal requests at one point. I've spent about 5 hours on the phone with apple - basically the marketing promise that it works with iCloud library is false. It's a very expensive dumb speaker at this point and apple's marketing is a lie. This is painful for me to say as an Apple fanboy of 30 years' standing with a mac saturated home....

I appreciate those of you who have spent time with Apple to try to figure this out. I am still amazed that I have not seen this failure of the system described in any major blog. I have tried to point this out to a few Apple centric blogs but no one seems to care. My experience is that when the music stops and/or skips tracks it will only play "uploaded" tracks (requiring a reset to the HomePod to kick start things) and skip "matched" tracks. I did not go the iTunes Match route - I went the Apple Music route with my library.