Exactly. Also worth mentioning is that most younger listeners don’t care about albums at all. The streaming playlist paradigm has incentivized hopscotching from track to track, with no regard to album, artist, or even genre.
Many of these listeners (myself included) have accumulated significant numbers of individual tracks, divorced from the album they originally came from (if there ever was one). I have thousands of tracks from old Paste compilation CDs, DJ mixes, SoundCloud and MP3 blog downloads, bootlegs, Razormaid and other remix services…
They all have in common sketchy metadata, and it would be ridiculous to have them stored in individual artist-album-date file structure. Instead I have them loosely aggregated in folders that are meaningful to me, and which will never work well with search functions, absent a gigantic amount of effort and time I will probably never undertake. But they do work perfectly well with every other media player that lets me browse and filter by file location.
Again, this is about options for the many people here who have repeatedly asked for this functionality. Obviously Harman sees value in increasing Roon’s user base, and not artificially limiting it out of fear of offending the purists.