Okay, well, I think I've made some config tweaks that have helped the SMB performance. The full collection rescan still takes forever, but it always did and that's expected. The update changed, however, is now as fast as it was on linux. That was the important one.

Switched the style to Fusion, looks great now. See? If you just don't respond they'll solve their own problems.

Just looking at one of my FLAC files and its metadata, tagged by SongKong (pulling from MusicBrainz), I see the following pertaining to dates: <ORIGINAL_YEAR>1976</ORIGINAL_YEAR> <ALBUM_YEAR>1997</ALBUM_YEAR> <ORIGINALRELEASEDATE>1997</ORIGINALRELEASEDATE> <Recorded_Date>1997</Recorded_Date>