I'm gonna try out Vanilla Music now. FWIW I use Musicolet from GPS and it's quite nice. I hope to learn whether and how our criteria intersect by exploring Vanilla....

Update: out of the box it seems to be reading tags strangely. Maybe I could fix this studying the settings more, but I'd say you have an upgrade opportunity switching off Vanilla. Signal is hard to replace though.

Honestly, the only thing I want out of Vanilla is the filesystem view. The only modes I ever use with a music player are to browse files as I organized them into folders, queue them up, and play the queue on repeat and/or shuffle.