I know this topic has been discussed a few times, but I would like to reiterate a few points here.
First of all, the point of creating a playlist is that when I play it, I want to listen exclusively to the tracks it contains and nothing else (selecting a genre/album/artist is the same, of course).
That is, I expect the following behavior:
1. in the view of the selected playlist I can start it - either in sorted order or in shuffle mode.
2. in shuffle mode the playback doesn't start with the first track, but with a random track from the playlist
3. when all tracks are played, playback should stop - and not jump to another list
4. when in shuffle mode, skipping the last track will cause playback to stop - and not continue with another list
5. if I start shuffle mode again in the list view, a new random order will be created
I believe this behavior is what most of all PA users want.
Unfortunately this is very difficult to implement in PA, because the two upper buttons in the view of a single playlist (Shuffle/Play) do NOT create the desired mentioned behavior, but what only makes sense in the overall view of ALL playlists: There it is ok if Play starts the first playlist and then jumps to the next, and there it is also ok if Shuffle means that afterwards any other playlist is played - but not in the view of a SINGLE playlist. There it should generate the behavior as in 1.
I know that the user can still influence the behavior of the playback in the view of the currently played track with the corresponding buttons - but who wants to (have to) do that? As I said, when I start a playlist, I just want it to play the way I want it to and that's it.
I think the GUI should first and foremost accommodate the average user's behavior. 95% of the users use 5% of the features and only 5% of the users use 95% of the features. If there are too many knobs to change things on, and then they are in the wrong places, then the whole thing becomes unintuitive, irrational and quite annoying. Right?