[DaveBlake]

I will admit that the title of this thread irritates me, Kodi is far from "useless" even with large music libraries, in fact I find it pretty dam amazing for free software created by volunteers that runs on a £30 RPi. But yes it does have some design weaknesses. The GUI was not designed to handle showing large lists (thousands) of songs (or anything else) quickly, nor was it designed for user to add thousands of songs (over a weeks worth of playback time) to the queue quickly.

As I have said before you can avoid many of the slow GUI on large lists issue by using filters and smartplaylists etc., acutally make use of the library features. Or you could use remote apps like Yatse to control Kodi as a music player, I even find the dynamic rule based filtering it offers more powerful than what Kodi can do itself.

In V18 there were serval improvements to music library, but this is still an issue.
Would be awesome if this gets tackled.

A fundamental redesign of the GUI / player queue interaction to allow for lazy loading of huge lists of songs has not been possible with the time and people available. But we have added to that ways that you can filter your music to aid choice, made API access 5 times faster (for remote apps) and fixed a few areas that we slowing down db access especially on MySQL databases.

If anyone thinks we need reminding of the GUI large list problem, I promise we don't. As I have said before no amount of user desire can make new skilled people appear to volunteer their time and expertise to Kodi deveolpement, let alone fix any specific issue.

Meanwhile there are many great ways in which Kodi can make  large music collections accessible and enjoyable