Thank you for asking, @BigWheel 
I am not the author of this thread. I own a FireTV in every room and Plex on FireTV is our “every-day” tool for watching a movie.
I am using “Actors/Actresses smart collections” for my big “want to keep” movie library.
Top 10 reasons for smart collection for actors/crew.
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Ease of use: Did you ever try to filter for an actor on a device without keyboard? This is a pain.
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Ugly landing “page” for actor filter: I am a movie lover, so I want my library to look nice. Filtering an actor brings up just a filtered library… nothing more. It just does not look nice.
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No actor image on filter: Smart Collections can have a cover image. There are big Poster libraries out there containing specially crafted actor/crew posters.
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One big chunk of actor list vs. One nice tile for each actor… once you see it, you never go back.
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Less is More from time to time: I don’t want to filter by ALL of the actors. With smart collections, I choose the top ten, top twenty-five or Top100 of actors of my personal favour.
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Smart: Set up and forget about it… whenever I am adding another movie with an actor, smart collections are poulated automatically.
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Number of movies: Right under the smart collections poster tiles, there’s a handy info on how many movies we own for this actor/actress/director - without even entering that collection.
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Descriptions: something no filter mechanism can offer… at the moment, we created 115 such smart collections - each with its individual person image (in a coherent design) and a description copiy&pasted from my favorite language wiki (since Plex is not collecting info on actors or crew) into the description field. This looks fantastic both on Plex Web as well as on FireTV player devices.
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My wife loves it - From time to time, It is the right time to watch a movie with one of her favorite actor’s movies. It is not so much important, which movie. My wifes opens up Plex on FireTV, goes to our big library, changes to collection view and has all the big covers containing nice images of actors and actresses. Within thirty seconds, she’s able to choose a nice movie she did not think of before she saw first the actor, then the movie covers. Wife happy… myself happy.
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Organizable: Collections can replace movies in mediathek view… for a collection, you can decide whether you want either the collection being visible or the movies or both when scrolling through a library. So, with all my old Louis de Funés movies I chose to not show the individual movies but only the collection in the standard library view (again, makes my wife happier) while I hide to rest of the actors collections from standard library view (having them easily accessible via the collection tab. Fantastic.
If you want, I can show a couple of screen shots about how cool it actually looks. I even went forward in that forum and wrote down my ideas on how Plex devs could easily allow even additional library tabs for actors and crew to get even more out of this wonderful feature. Here you go:
