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Dismissing this out of hand is a little unfair. Omnibus editions, certainly. But good anthologies are often carefully curated and themed and designed to be read together as a whole.
This situation often applies to non-fiction. Tertiary level textbooks and academic publications for instance, will often have an editor (or ten) and multiple contributors who provided specific chapters related to their expertise. These are very often pdf's too, if you can get them electronically, which even if you did want to split them up, isn't necessarily as convenient to do as epubs. For a start, a great many textbooks are DRM'ed, which opens that whole can of worms. For a second, they often are heavily cross-referenced between chapters, which again is exceedingly inconvenient if you split it up into 8 bits just because there are 8 chapters.
This is not shoehorning a concept of books onto things that are not meant to be books. They most certainly are books, and splitting them into pieces would lose some of that context, as the pieces relate to each other.
Like the OP, I would be pretty happy to have a plugin that helped manage multi-author and/or edited books in a sensible manner.
In the meantime, I simply put the editor names first in the author list so they are sorted there, so I can at least find them, and add all the other contributors as authors after the editors. I suspect there's a better way.
(Offtopic, but post #5 is incorrect. GR does not split anthologies unless the author republishes parts of them separately. Short stories that have never been published separately are routinely merged back into the anthologies they came from and removed from the database. This is not "splitting up anthologies" but simply recording what's actually been published.)
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