First I'm just cleaning up the multiple artist albums and then I'll go back and try that F2 trick to fill in the rest.
Well if you do it in that order, cleaning first then copy, you will have to be more selective. You won't be able to copy to ALL albums, you realize, you'll just want to to do that to some (the empty ones).
Along those same lines, however, I'm curious how you guys organize your music for compilation type albums....
So this is a fair question. But there's really no right or wrong answer here. It's just a matter of personal preference.
Undoubtedly, when Rod chimes in, he will offer some ideas that I think are ridiculous, and think the same of some of mine; but he is Australian so a certain amount of that is to be expected.
What I do is along the lines of what you seem to be describing. For a true "compilation" album, I generally set the Album Artist to "Various". I like it sorting not at the top of the artist list. My thoughts on "(Multiple Artists)" I have already revealed.
For your Eagles homage example, I would put that under Album Artist=Various, definitely. My advice is never leave [Album Artist] empty. That's just sloppy, and can cause problems. It forces you to rely on [Album Artist (auto)] and as has been demonstrated, that field is sometimes just wrong. Plus, if you only sometimes fill [Album Artist] then later if you try and actually use it directly you will sometimes get null results, and that is bad too. Other than "it saves me 2 seconds" I can not think of any good reasons to leave it empty, and I can think of many good reasons why you should fill it in. So just fill it in.
(For those who will want to whine about the 2 seconds, you can create an auto import rule that automatically sets it equal to [Album Artist (auto)] on import, so those people can just hush.)
For soundtrack albums, I will generally assign them to "Various" if they are rock songs by a bunch of artists, like a lot of Scorsese movies, for example. But honestly I don't have a lot of those types of soundtrack albums. If a soundtrack album is a bunch of themed classical/instrumental compositions by the same composer, I will generally set the composer as the artist. For example, the soundtrack to "The Shipping News" I've filed under "Christopher Young". (nice music, you should give it a listen). I would concede that filing soundtrack albums with an album artist of "Soundtrack" is very reasonable... But the reason why I don't do that is that I have other compilation albums, with the Album Artist=Various (as I said), and generally I find it more pleasing and intuitive if those types of soundtrack albums are grouped with those compilation albums. So I put them all under "Various" and apply a genre of "Soundtrack" as appropriate. That seems to give me the best of all possible worlds, at least as it suits me.
As I said I set the Genre to most soundtrack albums to "Soundtrack" so I can find them easily. Even to this there are exceptions, though, as I file Tan Dun's compositions under his name and in the classical genre.
It is not important to me whether this (the rules or the exceptions) makes sense to anyone else. It makes sense to me. And that is the same rule you should apply. Organize your music the way it makes sense to you, so that you always find your music exactly where you expect to find it.
If you categorize an album in such a way that you have to always remind yourself "oh, it's not in that place, it's over in that other place" or you can't remember where it is when you want to navigate to it, then you have failed yourself. Consistency and rigor is good, but slavish devotion to it to the extent it incommodes you is not. As you do your organizing, think of yourself as the cataloger, but remember who the customer truly is.
A well organized and tagged music collection, "curated" in other words, is indeed very pleasing. You will certainly be happier when you get done. I gave some music to a friend of mine once, and he came back to me "Whoa, this is all so beautifully tagged! It has lyrics and liner notes and everything. It's really nice; I'm going to have to do this to the rest of my music." So he actually appreciated it, even though subsequently it cost him weeks of time tagging all his own music to bring it up to standard!