I have over 600 CD's on my players and I have my music organized like some of the others here do. I have no trouble surfing through to find what I need quickly. First, I have to select from my "CD Collection" or my compiled "playlists". Once I've selected CD Collection, I have the tree in alphabetical order (A, B, C, D.....).
The artists are arranged in these A, B, C, D... lists. Each artist is in itself is also a "playlist" containing the artists albums which can be selected individually or as a group by pressing down twice on the artist. This method works great for me, although it was a bitch to setup initailly!