In case anyone else comes along and is wondering about this, MC does a great job creating playlists for my Pono. Very simple to build and send to Pono.
Also, I had built a lot of playlists in iTunes (now Music in MacOS Catalina) for my iPod Classic and I easily imported them into MC and installed them on Pono. So, if anyone has built a lot of them there and doesn't want to recreate them from scratch in MC they should know they won't have to.
David