This can be done, but it's a bit complicated.
First either change your list style to details view or go to a view that has details.
Make sure the fields you want are available as columns (Year or Date, and Album Artist Auto).
Now first click on the column header for year, then the one for Album Artist Auto.
You will see that Year has an arrow with a 2, and Album Artist Auto has an arrow with a 1.
This means you are sorting first by album artist then by year.
Now for the black magic...
On the drop down arrow for your tab, select Sort By->Custom->Preset->Save... Give it a name: "Album Artist then Year"
This will allow you to save your current sorting scheme as a new custom sort type.
(You can also do the above by manually constructing a sort by adding things in the Sort By->Custom dialog, but they're equivalent, and this way you can see visually what you're doing as you build the sort.)
Now that that's done, go back to the view you want sorted that way, or just change it back to thumbnails. Click the down arrow on the tab, select Sort By, and you'll find you can select the new sorting method you just created.
To set the thumbnail text, click on the down arrow on your tab again, and select Thumbnails->Thumbnail Text.
Here you can enter whatever expression you want for the thumbnails in that view.
Don't worry, your experience was the same as mine. You're right it can do almost anything, but some of it is pretty obscure and undocumented. But there are people here on the forum who can make it do all sorts of crazy things.
The best thing about these custom sort presets, by far in my opinion, is that you can utilize them in theater view, which has very limited sorting capabilities on its own (because there are no column headers to click!). Using these custom sort types, you can sort things in theater view any way you can think up in standard view.