Would using "Album Artist" instead of "Album Artist (auto)" be easier to program?
For my collection that would work as I have manually populated all my files with the appropriate "Album Artist" (15,000 + files - my compilations have "Various Artists" as the "Album Artist".)
While that might not be ideal for everyone, it'd be a whole lot better than nothing. For me, this is my #1 issue with MC. I really don't want to retag files as a workaround, but I also hate how junked up my iPod is....
Here's how I've dealt with the problem while I wait for MC to bring the feature back:
I have created a custom tag field, "Artists". Using Library Tools, I copy the "artist" field to "artists". (So all my individual artist tags in compliations are backed up) Then I copy "album artist [auto]" to "Artist." So, when I sync to my Zen, the artist field will show the artists for albums and "various artists" (or whatever "album artist [auto]" shows) for compilations. The way you're set up now, you could copy over either "Album Artist" or "Album Artist [auto]" to achieve the same result. The key is to back up the individual artist tags to another tag.
When the plugin gets updated to let us map tags, I'll simply mass copy all the "Artists" tags back to "Artist" so my tagging is standard again.
Hope this helps.
P.S. Because the menu system in the Zen only allows you to search Genre->Album or Artist->Album (instead of Genre->Artist->Album, which is what I'd like), I've also modified my "Album" field. I back up the original "Album" field to a custom "Albums" field, and then I use the "get tags from file" (or whatever it's called) to fill the "Album" field with "artist-album" (my music is stored on my PC by album: I have a top leve folder for each genre folders, under which are "artist-album" folders, one folder per album), getting the field values from the directory structure.
That way, on the Zen, when I go into a genre, I don't see a list of album names (or 5 "Greatest Hits" in a row with no clue who the artist is, or a bunch of Symphony 1s, Symphony 5s, etc), but have all the music in the genre showing in artist order ("Beatles - Rubber Soul" "Beatles - White Album")
I have the MC pane view set to show columns for Genre Artist
Albums -- since I have the artist showing in the artist column, I don't have to repeat it in the album title column.
If Creative ever gets its act together and writes some decent firmware for the Zen that allows decent level searching, I'll restore to the standard tag format....