They said in EA that there is certainly room for tweaking the balancing, so i am sure feedback from different users and their use cases will be helpful:
There are a bunch of factors currently:
Personally, for instance, I prefer that it downloads recent plays because I never listen to an album just once and it’s more that I dive into a “topic” for a while and listen to a set of albums all the time until I switch to a new topic. Others will see it differently. I do agree with others (in the first link) that the percentage of existing favorites is too low. But others may then say “I heard the favorites, why download them” 
Maybe it needs some dials to satisfy everyone.
If it helps for now, you do still have the option to download albums manually that you really need offline. (Or convert smart download to permanent manual ones)