Yeah, AFP is awful and seems to be barely maintained at Apple these days. They’ve put a lot more recent effort into doing first-class SMBv2 support in the past few years, and that’s the direction where it seems they’re going.
No-one should use AFP for anything, ever, if SMBv2 is an option. Apple can’t kill it because compromising backwards compatibility is nasty for them, but we can certainly eradicate it from our lives 
The disappearing albums thing is an AFP bug. We’re aware of it, but not a way to fix it–from our perspective, the files simply disappear. We can’t figure out how to distinguish that situation from files being legitimately deleted because at the system call level, the two situations look identical.