I am an avid Lightroom user so am doubly intrigued about this request.
tester, would you billing to elaborate on what it is that is accomplished in Lightroom and what you are looking to do in Media Centre?
From your description I understand it to be:
1) Select a subset, in this instance albums
2) shortcut key configuration performs some action on the selected albums
3) your example = add selected albums to new playlist
4) rinse repeat.
If the above is correct, would the playlist be retained after closeout and next boot up?
In Lightroom I use sidecar files (I shoot raw) and usually maintain the images based on the shoot date. I assigned meta data to the images after importing and I may change the file names, but usually it is just the meta data.
For a selection of images (from friends, or of some particular event), I may create a subdirectory and move all images to that directory (with Lightroom creating a real folder and migrating the images). Is it at the step of selecting many objects and applying some meta tag and/or moving them that would be similar to what you are hoping for in Media Centre?
Kind Regards,
Z