There is however a VERY simple solution for this.
It's a very easy to add feature I asked for some time ago.
The tool to move, copy from one field to another was added some time ago. If this was extended to allow fields to be merged it would work as an AMAZING work around for this problem and for giving the tree view ALOT of power.
You could do this:
[CustomField2] = [year] - [album]
and then do a view scheme like this:
artist
- customField2
and it'd sort them by year. It'd also display the year info there as a little added bonus.
THis could also be configured to just as easily be:
[CustomField2] = [year] - [album] - [bitrate] - [format]
etc, etc
and presuming your files were tagged correctly with the songs in one album having the same bitrate and year etc set it'd enable the tree view to display a great summary of all the info of each album while browsing it.
You'd be able to see each albums: year, bitrate and format without looking anywhere but the tree.
It'd be VERY powerful, or at least I think it would