If I understood it correctly, Plex considers the different behavior to be “by design” – so the issue is only that smart collections have the full set of visibility options even they’re not supposed to be available.
You can still have smart collections – but maybe it’ll be easier to access the library via the Collections tab for your use case.
As a side note… organizing the library by actors via a smart collection has its caveats. A smart collection will e.g. not distinguish different actors by the same name. IMDb is e.g. listing 13 persons named “Jack Black” – your smart collection will pick up every single one of them, not necessarily the same person.
IIRC there’s been a feature suggestion to get another tab like Categories. The Categories tab will group your library by genres. I’ll need to see if I can find the other suggestion I have in mind… that one was basically asking for a similar grouping based on actors (or directors).
Edit:
link to the referred feature suggestion (that suggestion didn’t get all that much attention/support from the community)
