[DaveBlake]

I have been struggling with the same issue....
...kodi shits the bed almost every time I try and do an operation against the whole collection. Tried party mode, shit the bed again, I'm running out of options. Why is kodi so completely shitty at a large collection, or am I missing something?

By "shits the bed" I guess you mean something unwanted and messy, but honestly a less poetic and more precise description of what happens would be more useful.

I can guess, as the other guys have, that you are experiencing the known problem that viewing the entire unfiltered songs node when there are lots of songs in your collection is very slow. But perhaps that is not what you are trying to complain about?

Grumbling aside, I'm all ears for any tips on how to be able to simply play my entire collection at random without kodi totally dying every time.

What you want is "party mode", it will do exactly what you ask. Search for that, there are plenty of posts that describe it.

This seemed to be no problem on winamp or various PC programs...if kodi is supposed to be such an awesome media player, how come it isn't set up to incrementally handle these large operations? Couldn't the queuing and playing be broken into manageable pieces so that it can at least start to play through the collection while it does whatever processing it needs to in the background?

Yes it could, but it requires some fundamental design changes that no volunteer has had the time, skills or interest to undertake yet. Users that want to queue their entire music collection, like they do on Winamp, find it a terrible flaw. On the other hand many users with large music collections are happy to select smaller subsets. I for one would never want to see a list of 130000 songs, it would be useless for me.

The slow songs node is not a database issue per se, but the design of how the data is handled once within Kodi. I don't know I was not there, but I would guess that the original design of how all the library items are loaded into local memory before display arisies from the video library. You are very unlikely to want to queue 130000 videos.

Hoping the plex addon will obviate this crippling limitation.

I don't think so. Try party mode, or as others have said use filtering by genre, artist or other smart playlist rules to select smaller subsets of your music.