>tell me, why should a billy joel box set CD that has ray charles guest
>on one track (and thus is marked as such on TPE1) be called a VA album
>by SC7?

And exactly how do you enter guest performers in your TPE1 tag?  There is no 
defined allowance for having guest performers in TPE1, due to the lack of any 
standard.

The official declared spec says:
4.2.1   TPE1    [#TPE1 Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)]

So you should only put lead performers in the tag.  Is a guest performer 
considered a lead performer?  Most internet sources for automatically setting 
tags will typically not include guest performers.  Guest performers are 
typically not tagged, unless YOU added them, in your own defined format.

Do you use a separator character?  Do you enter several ARTIST tags?  Or do you 
enter a single artist tag with something like "Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra"?

The official spec says that lead performers should be separated with "/".  I 
think it says somewhere that there should be one single TPE1 tag, but several 
apps actually understand having several tags, or using a 0x00 byte to separate 
multiple artists (which is handy because iTunes only allows one TPE1 artist, 
but reads up to the 0x00, so it looks like there is only one artist and thus 
doesn't think an album is a compilation).

Some apps may read your additional guest artists, other will not.  Some will 
see it as a compilation, others will not.

I'm just trying to demonstrate that it is very hard for an application to 
decide how to handle id3 v2.3 tags because there's lots of different 
interpretations made by applications.

You seem fixated on never needing to edit tags, but it's likely that you are 
adding guest performer tags, not adding album artist tags and not adding 
compilation tags.  And then you complain that it's not doing the right thing, 
etc.
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