When sorting by album in typical digital music players, an album with several guest artists or a compilation is treated as separate albums unless they have a common "Album Artist" in the metadata, which will tie them together, and treat the album as one.
I think that's right but with one caveat, at least with respect to Mediamonkey, where tracks having a blank field for album artist are also grouped together and treated as being within a single album. In any case, I think Tesla has really screwed up the organizational aspects of the USB music interface by trying to do the wrong things, but ignoring the things they should do. For example, Tesla should never have let the Internet touch the USB music interface, or at least give us a setup option to NOT have album art downloaded and to NOT look up and add metadata from an Internet database. Tesla essentially repopulates every one of the 2000+ songs on my USB drive with metadata that I deliberately erased prior to storing it on the USB drive. Now I have to wade through several hundred useless album listings just to find the 25 or so that I actually listen to as albums. Everything else I just listen to by Artist since most musicians can't seem to get more then two or three good songs per album. I don't need to see album art, since listening to music is, well, an aural experience rather than a visual one, but it still kind of annoys me when they pull the wrong album art (which is quite a bit of the time). I also don't see why the touchscreen display should be cluttered with album art if you don't want it there - browsing would sure be faster without it.
Anyone competent enough to load music on a USB drive from a computer is competent enough to click a button to automatically populate metadata to the files from their computer, prior to downloading onto the USB drive - using any one of number of free programs that do the job at least as well as Tesla, so there was never any reason in the first place for Tesla to duplicate that capability except to add another showy gizmo that adds no capability the owner didn't already have. Instead it removes capabilities the owner previously had. Silly.
Yet, at the same time, they can't seem to add playlists and they can't organize compilation albums correctly, as you've already noted. Until recently, the car couldn't shuffle tracks and from my limited time driving the car, the set of songs you're shuffling through when you get home at night is lost when you start driving the next day, so that once the currently-playing song finishes, the media player just stops playing music. Since the car is always on at night, and if the USB drive stays in the car, why can't this information be preserved?