Discovering how the so-called "Album" grouping works was an ah-ha discovery for me too, after lots of banging on MC trying to get it to "behave".
Definitely, it should have a name that indicates it is not simply sorting/grouping on Album, much like "Album Artist (auto)" has a name that provides a clue. But even that causes questions. Maybe there should be a naming convention for internal/MC-manipulated fields, bolted-in compound-fields, views, etc. Not sure "Album (auto)" would do it, maybe "Album+Artist+Year" as the name of this special grouping option?
There are similar things going on in MC's Images mode when Album grouping is used for photos. For instance, it seems to insist on sorting newest-to-oldest, which is not how a classic physical photo album would be organized. It's OK to have special handling, but it should be explicitly special and properly named and there should be no restriction on the user overriding it. Since "Artist" isn't a common field for images, I'm still not sure what the Album view/grouping is doing with photos.