it repeatedly brings up the same albums at the front of the list and ignores many others.

You could be describing something that's just an interesting statistical coincidence.

However, the more time I spend with this car player, the more I think that its randomization routines aren't all that random. The notes in this thread (and others), combined with my experience, are leading me to be increasingly suspicious.

This article, although not related to the compiler that's used to make the empeg software, gives some insight into how the randomizers built-in to a language might not be right, and how a programmer might work around the problem.