(iTunes) wants to take control over all of my music.

I decided to let iTunes take control, moving all my MP3s into its own folder and deleting the originals. It was a leap, but I'm glad I did it. Now, the file names and tags stay consistent whenever I fix typos and otherwise rearrange things in iTunes. I sync the iTunes folder directly onto my empeg, using a number of soup views to give me different ways of looking at my tunes in the car. I'm pretty happy with this setup.

It's hard to keep it up to date with everything else

Yeah, you pretty much need to buy into it all the way.

I'd just prefer a good MacOS player.

But then, you can't do anything to the iTunes database and any changes you make to ID3 tags won't necessarily be noticed by iTunes.

I'm enamored with all the other random features of iTunes. In particular, for my DJing needs, iTunes BPM Inspector lets me tap-count my tunes, and it dumps the results directly into the iTunes database and the ID3 tags. Once you decide to buy into iTunes, it seems to reward you for the effort.