Sort artists grayed out

My problem isn’t sorting; it’s the seemingly random appearance of gray text. Gray text, in the context of sorting fields, is supposed to mean that iTunes put in a sort result based on song name or artist name or album artist name because the user didn’t fill in the sort fields. In my case, the filled-out sort fields also are grayed out. The song has complete sort information in every field but won’t switch font colors to black. I’m old, and I need better contrast than gray on white. (I thank Apple for making most of its interface elements, including text, gray.)

Now, I understand. As often is the case, I don’t like Apple’s decision. I don’t like a sort field that has a quarter of the entries grayed out. Grayed-out text is supposed to mean that it can’t be accessed or, in menus and buttons, can’t be selected. It should not mean that iTunes knows it should remove “The” from a song name, artist, or album title when sorting. It’s as if iTunes congratulates itself for being so smart and tells you when it is smart by removing half the color from the text. Apple could make the gray/black appearance a preference, but Apple eliminates preferences with each new OS. (One of my least favorite is not allowing users to set the interval for screen saver slide shows.)

I discovered that putting a space at the end of the text in the sort field eliminates the gray text. It doesn’t interfere with anything in iTunes. It obviously will give wrong sort field results if you export an XML file, but I can’t see how the extra space would matter.