This Thing is a Frustrating Piece of Garbage...

Question

...and Apple's user manual isn't a whole lot of help.
So now that I've got your attention, I hope I can get some help.
I bought an iPod Nano as my first mp3 player because of Apple's reputation for intuitive and kluge-free operation, but so far this has been a frustrating and disappointing experience.
Some of the issues I'm having with this thing:
1) I have a library of mp3 files on my computer, nicely arranged in folders. I import those folders into iTunes and synch to the Nano. Instead of having these files nicely organized on the Nano, I end up with a multiplicity of folders (i.e. instead of a "Beatles" folder I have folders named "Beatles", "Beatles, The", and "The Beatles" with their contents seemingly strewn randomly among them. Yeah, that makes individual songs REAL easy to find.
2) Along similar lines, this overly-helpful little monster decides to strew album contents among folders that it creates on its own. For instance, I end up with three Flogging Molly albums in the "Flogging Molly" folder, but then I end up with a separate "Flogging Molly / Lucinda Williams" folder for one individual song that has a guest artist involved. So not only does this stupid thing scatter the contents, I can't listen to the album in its intended order because the little Nazi is dictating otherwise. ***?
3) I was hoping to make use of the handy video feature. But I can't get the frigging video files to download to my computer. Yes, I tried using the "Help" menu and yes, I read the frigging manual. It tells me I need to "...click iPod nano in the device list and click the Summary tab". I'd be happy to do so but I can find no "device list", nor is there any such thing as a Summary tab on my iTunes menu. I see my iPod listed under "Devices" in the column on the left side of the screen, but the only options I have associated with that is to expand it to show individual folders for Music, Movies, and TV Shows. The manual states that, alternately, I can go to "My Computer" where I can see that the iPod is treated as an external hard drive. Except that it isn't. Yes, it's plugged into an active USB port, and yes, iTunes is on. But my computer doesn't display the nano as an external drive, whereas it DOES display my 500 gB external hard drive when I attach it to the same USB port.
4) My displeasure doesn't end with the nano. iTunes is similarly an anger-inducing little dictator of an application. I've checked the "Sync only checked songs and videos" box and then clicked the "Sync" tab at the bottom right of the window several times, yet my nano is loaded with files that I DON'T WANT LOADED on it. Again, I've read the manual and am pretty certain that I'm doing this right, with the possible exception that the manual states I need to click on the "apply" button. Am I wrong in assuming that the "sync" button is the "apply" button, because there for **** sure isn't anything labelled "apply" anywhere on the screen or in the drop downs.
So if you've gathered that I'm less than enchanted, you're quite right. I hope someone at Apple reads this and has a good, hard look at these issues, because at this point I'm regretting spending a lot more for an Apple product because of their reputation, only to find out that my music and videos are being held captive by an electronic Kim Jong-il. And hopefully someone here can help me figure out how to use this lovely-but-aggravating little monster.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I ended up checking the "Manually manage music and videos" box under "options" on the "Summary" page.
Then I clicked on the arrow to the left of my iPod in the left column, and clicked on "Music".
Next, I found the files I wanted to remove. Say, for instance, I wanted to get rid of all the "Rage Against the Machine" files- clicked on the topmost file to highlight it, held down the shift key, clicked on the bottommost file so that all of the "Rage Against the Machine" files were highlighted, then right clicked to bring up the menu and clicked on "Delete". When the "Are you sure you want to remove these?" window showed up I clicked on "Remove". Now all of these songs are gone from the nano but are still in my iTunes files.
Similarly, I looked in the "Artist" colum and found songs that had variations on artist names. So for instance I went through all the Beatles tunes and found the songs listing the artist as "Beatles, The". Clicked on each of those songs one at a time to highlight each one, right clicked to bring up "Get Info", clicked on the "Info" tab, and changed the artist name simply to "Beatles" and clicked on "OK".
Finally I clicked on the "eject" icon just to the right of the iPod name. After a brief sync it was Ok to remove the iPod. And now my music files are crunched down into individual files, and the stuff I don't want isn't on the nano.