Well, BruceGil, first I have to say is, you did a clever verbose compilation of Mp3tag public but sometimes covered knowledge and wisdom!
For my part sometimes I would like to jump to the original sources you did refer to and read the original words from the authors, therefore you may insert into or append to your text work those links which points to the Mp3tag forum thread database on which your compilation relies on.
Even so you should be careful not to mix up "The developer has stated" statements with other user contributions. Yes, I have found some words and sentences of mine which are in your compilation now stated as words from the developer. Well, even I was pleased by this kind of professional elevation, I wonder, if the Mp3tag developer Florian Heidenreich would like those kind of interchanges with the simple Mp3tag user Detlev Dalitz (anyway, in these days I will get to write my 1.000th forum posting, he he, jubilee :-))).
Back to your "How to" compilation ...
I do not quite understand why you go the way of "outsourcing" to some spreadsheet application like MS Excel and do there much of the work you can do natively in Mp3tag.
Even so I do not understand why to use a third party directory print utility to get the track's filenames and pathes. Instead simply use Mp3tag report section and print right out the filepathes you see in the current Mp3tag tracklist. If needed then use such a created report textfile in your spreadsheet.
Yes, using TAB as a delimiter is a rather safe way to go. But why do you leave this way by replacing TAB with some other character like the slash character "/"? This character has ambigious meaning in the different filesystem areas where Mp3tag can be used. Using a string in your description like "%artist%/%title%/%year%/%genre%" let the reader think of or read this as a filesystem path, but this is not what you have intended. Better to go the TAB way consequently from Excel to Mp3tag without replacing the TAB with another character. Or use some other delimiter char like the star character. I think Excel supports a user defined delimiter character when exporting a "CSV/SSV/TAB/AnyChar" delimited export file.
... , and yes, I think so, that the adjustment resp. binding between the import textfile entries and the Mp3tag tracklist entries is based only on the %_path% content, so that the list on the "left side" can be at any order than the list on the "right side" as long as the amount of lines is the same and there will be used entries which do exist in the filesystem. The %_path% placeholder can be used at any place in the line.
Hmm, is there any default? I use the tracklist view sorted by "%_folderpath%%_filename_ext%", sometimes by "%album%%discnumber%%track%%title%", sometimes by "%_folderpath%%band%%album%%discnumber%%track%%title%" for example.
I use my import textfiles organized to any kind and believe on the %_path% placeholder that the binding job will be done fine by Mp3tag.
DD.20090426.0010.CEST