Not really. When the custom mode is active, and the bottom button is pressed, emphatic goes away and the menu comes up set on playlist.

That part is a feature, not a bug. The idea is that if people want to pick playlists, emphatic needs to hide itself so they can see what they're doing.

If the knob is pressed, emphatic comes back up

So you want to use knob presses to select items in the menu instead of the down button? Umm.. That doesn't work. You'll have to train your brain to use the down button. You can still use the knob to quickly rotate the playlists, but when you want to select one, you gotta use the down button.

but since you never leave the menu, left and right then navigate the menu behind the scenes. Until you hit the top button to get out of the menu, left and right won't change tracks.

To give you an idea of what I'm working with here, I can't tell what state the player's menu is in. If Mr. Hijack wants to expose some userland calls to tell me whether the menu is active or not, maybe I can do something about this.. He does have some screen-scraping of some sort built into Hijack, I just can't get at it.