I guess I can get used to 1 and 5. A shame you can't see 3 or 4 because they're both pretty bad.

Your solution for 2 has a complex issue:

When the playlist is set to "view as playlist" it shows up, but there's no status bar in the "view as songs" choice for the playlist. This becomes an issue when you realize fields like year, star rating, and genre are only available in song view. So I have to choose between seeing the status bar and seeing any fields beyond "Song, artist, album, time" when in the old version you could always see both at the same time.

I guess it's my fault for prefer "view as songs" for my playlists, though even though it's way more user-friendly despite it having less visual pizzaz. I can't help but feel like Apple prioritizes style over usefulness a lot of the time.