I am in here.

I finally caught up with all the unheard music on my iPod. It was always a race: my listening habits pitted against my rampant acquisition of music, and now at last I have heard all the music on my iPod at least once. And it only took about five years.

(mostly for my own records in case this happens again)

I killed yamipod while it was updating the Grouping field in a bunch of songs. Bad idea. It killed the iTunesDB, which is the thing that tells iPod which files on the iPod drive are which songs. It also has the playlist info. So although I hadn't lost any songs, I lost the access to them Nothing more scary to me than an iPod that says "No Music".
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So I had an iTunesDB file from a couple days before the crash (lucky!), and put that in my iPod.
That meant that I had about two days' worth of files that were in the iPod drive but not tracked in the iTunesDB.
I went to the iPod drive and did a search in Windows Explorer for all files that had a change date within the previous two days.
I pulled all those files to the hard drive and added them to the iTunes library, then deleted the ones I had on the iPod already (change date could indicate that I had changed the name of the song, so it could still be in the database). Then I dragged them to the iPod - I verified that they wouldn't be duplicated on the drive, just get recorded in the iTunesDB. Now they showed up in the iPod just fine.
Once I felt that I had the iPod updated so that all the files on the drive were represented in the iTunesDB, I used CopyTrans to back up all the files on the iPod to my PC, and thence to iTunes. This is what you do if you don't keep all your tunes in iTunes, usually if you don't have room on the hard drive. I borrowed a drive from work for this.
I took screenshots of all my smart playlists for recreating, since they don't get backed up by CopyTrans- just regular playlists do.
Then I restored the iPod (wiped it out) and reloaded all the items (I have a smart playlist that contains everything added since 2000, so it includes video as well as music). Took about four hours. Once all the songs were on, I dragged my playlists from iTunes to the iPod.
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Sadly, I realized that a lot of my songs were missing album art for some reason. So I told itunes to get the art for all the songs, and deleted all the songs from the iPod and readded them from iTunes. This is what's happening now.

The good thing is that this is basically defragging the iPod drive and cleaning out any garbage that may be in there. The bad thing is that I can't seem to find the Extended Dance Mix of Shiny Shiny any more. It's possible that I didn't have it on the iPod, though. Must find.

28441 songs, 3797 artists, 76 days, 5 hours, 34 minutes, 32 seconds
3067 unheard songs

Most played - 44, Avril Lavigne, "Hot"
Shortest track - 0:00.709, Real Genius, "It Is God"
Shortest track that's actually music - :11, Portland Timbers Fans, "Allie-O"
Shortest track that's an actual album track: 0:04, 3rd Bass, "Jim Backus"
Shortest track that's an actual musical album track: 0:05, The Beau Hunks, "Laugh"

Longest Track - 1:32:22, L. Ron Hubbard, "5009c28-OK-3_Running An Engram"
Longest track that's music: 1:19:42, me, "Doubleplusmix - Ministry of Disc Two"
Longest Track that's an actual album track - 58:03, The Firesign Theatre, "Anythynge You Want To"
Longest Track that's an actual musical album track - 30:59, Scorpions, "Sun In My Hand"

First Alphabetical track: "A-a-a-choo! the Citadel", Ruby: The Adventures of a Galactic Gumshoe - chapter 4
Last Alphabetical track: "鬼助", 陰陽座
First Numeric track: "0020 Need You This Way", The Kleptones
Last Numeric track: "99.9° F", Suzanne Vega

ok, that's as far as I got before I died of boredom. R.I.P. me.