1. I think what duesy is saying about a "temp Playlist" is the idea of selecting songs to go to playing now,which I suppose can be viewed as a temporary playlist.
2. Yes, smartlist creation is a strength of MC, as long as your files are imported and tagged correctly.
3. I don't understand the import problem that duesy describes, either. While I do find the import function to be clumsy, I have also found it to be quite effective in a "batch" situation. Why you would want to import just a few files is beyond me, and defeats the whole purpose of MC anyway. I don't use the auto import feature, as a matter of fact, until now, I couldn't have told you what it did. I don't have MC setup as my "one file " player. I let Winamp do that, it's much faster to start (rather than MC loading my whole library), uses a lot less resources and is generally more efficient in that situation.
4. But, I do understand the idea that the playlist can become more focused. Maybe I'm missing something (wouldn't be a first) but pulling into a playlist rather than sending to a playlist makes sense. Say the window your focused on IS the playlist, and you have a "get" function, leaving you the ability to see your PL and what's going in it, rather than blindly throwing things at it and having to check on it periodically. I don't know, I don't program, I am an audio guy, as in producer\engineer, but I like the idea. If MC can already do this, please, point it out to me (and apparently, duesy)