Spot on. JRiver has the advantage of flexibility at the cost of a learning curve. My system with a fairly large library from over 3000 mostly classical CDs is to drill down in manageable stages. I might have a list of composers on the first screen, a list of a composers works on the next screen and on selecting a work, a list of the versions of each work on the next screen from which I can play the work or go into the next screen which lists the individual movements. How many stages or clicks is entirely down to the user.
For historical reasons and for classical recordings, using Sonos, instead of each entire CD becoming one album I made each work on a CD an album. This actually works very well, particularly as many CDs have mixtures of composers and or genres. There is one big snag, and that the files produced aren’t conducive to being assessed and catalogued by Roon. Roon assumes an album is a of complete CD. Of course, I could use JRiver to “reassemble” my files into Groups which Roon would see as rips of complete CDs but I don’t feel that Roon is offering me anything more than I, personally, am getting from JRiver. Quite the contrary in fact when it comes to all the different ways of browsing that can be set up in JRiver. For pop rock and jazz I keep to the conventional method of one CD being ripped a a complete album.
The most important thing I have learned is to be wary of tying oneself into a particular hardware manufacturer and their bespoke software. That £2k streamer may be usable now but a change of software could, as was the case with Sonos, render it barely usable. Many of this bespoke software solutions are primarily designed for pop recordings which are catalogued in a fundamentally different way.