[thestig]

Noticed that as of alpha2 (coming from alpha1) this setting in advancedsettings.xml is ignored, or otherwise not working (not 'smart' playlists).   The impact is pretty high for me, I use various automations and external triggers to launch M3U playlists every day (via kodi-send --action=PlayMedia(/path/to/playlists/foo.m3u) , and they all failed after my weekly apt upgrade ran overnight.   In the GUI, the problem was apparent - selecting a playlist no longer plays, it, rather it opens a virtual directory of the playlist items. 

I tried various (non smart) playlist formats without any change in behavior.  I created a new advancedsettings.xml with only the playlistasfolders (false) property present to exclude a potential bad advancedsettings file, or something being deprecated, though the debug log (I'm on Xenial) shows the advanced file being read and loaded without error. 

The wiki still shows playlistasfolders as being a valid selection, and I checked commit statements for alpha2 at Github to see if this was planned, didn't see anything.  But a forum search did turn up this statement  from dev heavyweight @jmarshall a couple years ago regards the property:

Smart playlists seems to ignore the <playlistasfolders> advanced setting. Is this intentional, or a bug/oversight? -sialvi

Probably a mixture. Personally I'd like the setting gone completely   -jmarshall

To get the old functionality back I flipped over to the stable release branch, though I'll probably go back the last pre-alpha commit to get some of the v18 functionality back.  

Any idea if this was a planned deprecation?