I’m going to head a slightly different direction on this thread. Having skimmed through most of it (so apologies in advance if this was covered), I think there is a basic acknowledgment that there is “work” to be done when digitizing CD’s.
This work can be done on the front end of the process in creating folder structures and other system level views to manage and categorize, or it can be done on the back end using various metadata. Either way, there is work to be done.
The real issue (which I originally had) is that when you first switch to Roon from anything else, you have to do work TWICE. I already did a bunch of work pre-Roon to build folder structures that I understood and could manage and made sense to me. Once I switched to Roon, I had to “redo” significant chunks of that work to make the metadata complete enough to accomplish the same goals.
The gut reaction to having to do this is simply human nature; I switched, and it’s now more effort than before. How is this better than what I already have? Depending on how much investment you have in your pre-existing digital organizational structures, this could be a pretty big punch in the gut.
At the end of the day, for me, I could see the potential for doing things in Roon that I couldn’t do with my folder organization schemes, so I bit the bullet and moved on. I can easily see others making the opposite choice.