Serious question: What was the reason for removing auto playlists?

As a software engineer I do understand that sometimes the process of creating software involves making trade offs and sometimes good features get cut for good reasons. Given that auto playlists seemed to function pretty well in the first version of the software, what was the design decision around not implementing auto playlists in version 2? I am really honestly curious.

I would have put this in one of the existing posts complaining about the removal of this feature but I really want to try and start from a position not of blame or anger, but one of curiousity.

Too be honest I am very disappointed since auto playlists is one of the features that I consider to be absolutely required for me to take media management software seriously. I have a really hard time thinking of any media management software that doesn't have this sort of feature as significantly lacking. In many cases software in this market that does lack auto playlists at least have a compensatory feature of allowing some sort of extensibility to the application through plug-ins or whatever but that is also missing from Zune v2.

Thanks for the work that you have done in the software and the great improvements that do exist. I'm going to give it a serious opportunity to see how the software fits into the way that I consume my music collection but without something that I consider so fundamental to they way I percieve the ideal method of that consumption I have a hard time seeing how this can work for me in the long term which makes my monetary investment in the hardware seem like a really very bad idea.

While it isn't "auto playlists", check out MusicIP Mixer.  It is software that will make playlists based off of the "sound" of the seed tracks rather than just genre/artist information.  It is very intelligent and works well.  I find it better than having to rate songs and then hearing the same 5* songs over and over again.

That's a great suggestion, thank you.

However given the previously noted lack of extensibility inherent in the Zune software, anything like this is still just a pretty ugly hack no matter how great the software used for the hack.

If anyone else is interested in giving it a try, I did find the download page pretty easily at http://www.musicip.com/mixer/index.jsp

i also miss the autoplaylist.  but the main auto list i had was a 4 and 5 star list.  which for whatever reason is also gone.  sigh