There is a toggle in Media Player Settings to turn Gracenote Management off. The Gladiator issue appears to have been a corrupt tag. Redoing the tags seems to have resolved the issue. With that, all of the above issues appear to be resolved, though more thorough testing is required to make sure things like playing in the correct album order are actually working properly now. I'm not sure what Gracenote was doing. Perhaps it's just not well supported in Canada. Perhaps I'm just too picky and want the player to do unrealistic things. 
