No problem, it has been a good distraction during a stressful time, purely a mental exercise for me!
Yeah it's not 100% on the view changing even with Confluence unfortunately (although I'd say about 95% of the time) - if you check the log, the call is always made, but I think it depends on where it is on the screen drawing cycle as to whether it gets respected (and it has to be called after all the nodes are added to the list). Also, if you have previously visited an artist, it stubbornly remembers the old visit setting it seems...
Although, with T! and other skins, it may also be them using other IDs for the views, in which case it won't work. If you can work out the IDs and let me know I can probably put appropriate testing code in...there's usually a ViewsFileMode.xml or similar to look in (this is the ones plugns can use as far as I can tell). I can have it trigger any view ID in there.
The album info is retrieved via the CLI (so telnet basically) - I think that's about as fast as anything, really, very little overhead there - and LMS doesn't use MySQL anymore, rather sqlite I think - either way talking to it directly is frowned upon and would complicate setup quite a bit. But each album needs a separate call (the list is done in one call, but to get the cover URLs etc, I need a call per album). I may do a paginated thing at some point, but I kinda like having them all there so I can 'sms' to a random number and choose from there...agreed, though, it takes a while - I will add a message/warning about that in the next version
(PS it's pathetic but you can +1 the reputation button if you feel so inclined