First of all, for whatever reason, MC doesn't seem to read the album artist (stored as "album artist") metadata I have stored in my FLAC iles. The problem with this is that I like viewing music with the album tag sorting by the album artist. Does MC read some sort of special album artist tag, because then I could do a batch convert with mp3tag or something.
MC does indeed read the Album Artist tag as that's what I use. In the Tag pane, check to see if the Album Artist for a particular track is filled in as you expect. If it is, then the problem is with your views and the way you have sorted them, perhaps you've not selected the Album Artist tag to group by (grouping by Artist or Album and sorting by Album Artist might not work as you would expect as it might not be a one-to-one relationship). If it's not, then perhaps MC is not reading this tag from FLAC files.
Also, is there any way to enter a sort name for artists/albums like in iTunes? Example: sorting /\/\ /\ Y /\ as "Maya", without renaming it to that. This is a much more minor issue but it'd be cool to be able to do that.
This is actually a similar issue to the above. Yes, there is a way to do this, again it's what I do. You need another tag to specify the Sort Album Artist and then use that in your views instead or Artist or Album Artist. Normal external tagging tools might not have this tag so you can either create a user-defined tag in MC, auto-fill it from Album Artist for most people, then alter the tags for the Maya tags manually, or "steal" another tag which is standard such as Composer. So, for any given track on an album by your mentioned artist, the tags would be as follows.
Artist: /\/\ /\ Y /\
Album Artist: /\/\ /\ Y /\
Sort Album Artist: Maya
I'm not sure off-hand whether you can get the views to sort by Maya but still display /\/\ /\ Y /\, I can't remember without looking if you can group by one thing and sort by another.