I never had any issues with the supplied collections on kindles. I have 4000 or so books, and I use like 50 collections. Even when I had to do them all over again when we got the cloud collections starting with the Paperwhite, it wasn't so much of a big deal to me. Sure, then it took a while, 4000 books after all. And ever single book is in at least one collection, most in more than one.
Now that we can do it on the website its much faster and easy. I wish we had that back when the cloud collections became a thing.
Of course once you caught up, its easy to add each book to collections. And the kindles themselves are also much faster now with adding them in. These things used to be an issue with larger libraries.
But then I remember using the K1, which had no collections of any kind. There, I would sort by recent and just click on all the books I wanted to read in the next few weeks so they'd be on the first pages. Those were the days
