Thanks to @beckfield for compiling this list of issues!
We’re in the (long) progress of working on some awesome general scanning and metadata upgrades, and I promise we’ll discuss the Plex Dance as part of it.
Just to give a bit of an Origin Story on the Plex Dance, when I was first designing the library system, I decided that the scanner owned the “critical hints” for a media file—essentially, the key bits of data which identified an item (e.g. show/S/E for an episode, or artist/album/track number for a track).
The agents, on the other hand, owned everything else outside of these critical hints, because it was confusing if they could actually change the identity of things. So the local media agent can control a lot of metadata, but they can’t change the critical set of hints which identify an item (because it would confuse the scanner).
Anyway, long story short to say it really seemed like a good idea at the time…
