[DaveBlake]

From a user perspective, since it is possible to play album playlists from the context menu, it seems like it should also be possible to play them in partymode.

Yes I agree, but unfortunately not how it was designed. The whole playlist concept could do with behaving more like partymode, that is lazy loading (or even just in time loading) of the song data. Big job!

I'm an album guy, I find the concept of mixing up songs kind of odd, but I'm old

Song smart playlists aren't feasible for me, that would require setting user ratings on thousands of tracks vs 100-200 albums.

I understand, rating songs is a thankless task too and the data is transitory (rebuild the library from scratch and it is gone). I wonder if we can come up with another approach?

What I don't get is why users (you are not alone) want to put more songs in a playlist than they can listen to in a day. Not saying that Kodi shouldn't be redesigned to show large lists of items faster, it could be browsing long lists of artists or albums etc., just not sure why people make long lists of songs to play.

Is what you want to do is take a group of albums, and then randomly play the songs from them? Do the albums have anything in common or are they simply in a .m3u file?