Yep, tweaks are retained over a power cycle according to my quick test - Whole player shuffled, 'Hate Artist' on first 4 artists, 'Like Artist' * 3 to get first 4 tracks by the same artist. Track count and shuffle order both restored as expected.

I wonder whether this is the reason that selecting a new playlist sometimes takes a while - a small playlist seems to load immediately, whereas a long playlist 'hourglasses' (Disks already spun up in both cases, shuffle off). Since the whole database is already in RAM, and we only need to know what the first 4 tracks are for display purposes, database access doesn't explain it. In both cases we only need to start caching the first track before starting, so that doesn't explain it either. But if we needed to write the running order to the dynamic data partition then that would be dependant on playlist size.