What you're saying, if I understand it, is this:

Say I'm listening to the whole unit, shuffled. Then a song from Rush's "Moving Pictures" album comes on, and I decide that I want to listen to all of Moving Pictures. Or perhaps I want to listen to all of their "Permanent Waves" album instead.

The way I'd handle it (with the current user interface) is this:

Press 0 on the remote to turn off shuffle. Now I'm in the middle of my unshuffled playlist, at some point in the middle of "Moving Pictures", in the middle of that artist's catalog (since I, too, store everything by artist/album). Then I use >> or << to get to the song I want in the Rush collection.

Admittedly, it might take a lot of hits on that << button if you have a lot of albums by that artist. But at least you don't have to take your eyes off the road. And if you know the artist's catalog, then you know approximately how many times to hit the button. For example, if I'm in the middle of Moving Pictures, about seven hits of the << button will drop me somewhere into the middle of Permanent waves, and I can fine-tune from there.

There's a problem with this, in that when you unshuffle, there's a bug where it doesn't always drop you back into the playlist in the middle of your artist/album collection. Sometimes it drops you into one of your other "misc" playlists (for instance, one of my mood playlists). For a while, Mike was interested in fixing this bug, but I haven't heard from him on the subject recently.

___________
Tony Fabris