Nothing straight forward
I use the comment & group fields, as they are written to the file meta data & will be recognized by other players, ratings, playlists not so much
Example:
Add all the songs from an artist to a play list, delete all the songs that you don't want to hear, assign what remains as group 1, repeat for several artists
Build a smart playlist filtering for group 1
I've gone through a bunch of my library, so group 1 is 5000 files
I can add additional filters, like exclude genres jazz, pop, less than 7 minutes....
I use the comment field for rating, I mark favorites $, my wife's favorites *
I also abuse genre for criteria like long, duplicate, alternate version, vinyl in addition to the more standard: rock, pop, jazz, classical, folk, swing....
With these methods if my computer dies as long as I have a current backup of my songs, I can rebuild my playlists, try a different player no problem
The ability to build smart playlists with as many criteria as I enter keeps me on Clementine or Strawberry :D