Apologies for awakening this thread, but some of you might be interested in the new 'plugboards' feature in the calibre beta (and soon, perhaps this week, in production). I hope that it resolves many of the issues discussed in this thread.
Plugboards permit you to specify new metadata to be written into a book when it is sent to a device or saved to disk. For example, you can construct titles that include series or what-have-you. You can alter the author_sort to conform to the kindle's rules. The changes affect only the copy of the book. The original in calibre's library is untouched.
Plugboards use the new template mechanism, which facilitates inserting text only if some other field has a value. Using templates, it is easy to generate values like '[Series-name 1] Title' if the book has a series, or simply 'Title' if the book does not. The same template mechanism lets you create GUI columns that contain the result of evaluating templates. You can create columns showing formats or isbn, in addition to showing the values you would use in a plugboard.
Read the
first post of the beta thread for more information.