You should choose the contents of the Genre tag to fit your use of MC.
Agreed.
The auto-downloaded Genres (or ones embedded in the tags already if you purchase music online) can be handy as a starting place, I suppose. I never use them though, as I want them organized how I want them organized.
For music, I find Genre is the most important tag to get things into the categories I want, and make my browsing efficient in a large collection.
I almost always just rip them to whatever it finds and then fix them afterwards in MC, though. Tagging through MC (especially if you are picking from a pre-defined list, like an established set of Genres), is faster and easier than typing it into the ripping tagging dialog.
Sometimes I change the pre-filled tag to "New" or something similar so that they are easily found and don't "pollute" my other views. There are lots of other ways to do this too... Just decide on what works best for you.
I guess I did need to have the lossless is lossless beat into me and stop worrying about quality.
It's okay. It
is confusing (and they should have never called that setting in FLAC "quality" in the first place, compression strength would have been a much better term).
But more, it is just very difficult to pivot from the world of analog signal quality and lossy digital compression as it has "historically" applied to digital audio, to have a full understanding of the technologies today. And, of course, there are unscrupulous businesses out there actively preying upon this confusion, and making it worse in the process.
The best way to think of FLAC (and APE and other similar lossless audio compression mechanisms) is as a "specialized ZIP format for audio files". Which is, frankly, exactly what they are. So long as they can be verified to be reliably lossless, and they have the file format features you want (tagging and whatnot), most of the rest is academic. And, many of those differences were driven by conditions in much earlier times technologically. Some things (like that quality setting in FLAC and ZIP) mattered a heck of a lot more when you were trying to cram as much data as possible onto a $899 20MB hard drive or a set of 3.5" floppies, but were also limited by your 66MHz CPU's decoding power.
PS. The first hard drive I ever owned myself (not my "parent's" or "family" system), was I think a 20MB drive (it might have been 24 or 30 or something). I didn't pay that much for it though, because I was poor, so I had to wait and scrape and save for that bad boy.