How about a DJ rather than a Genius?

There’s been plenty of commentary about the new Genius feature in iTunes. A recommendation engine is a nice new feature, but personally there’s a couple of other features I’d like to see on my iPod, or in iTunes. These are more in the “reacquaint yourself with the music you already own” category rather than recommending new purchases.
For example, I use the shuffle feature quite a bit, usually when I just want some background music to blot out noise when commutting. But there’s no context navigation available from the “now playing” view. If you’re on shuffle, then you can only proceed to the next random track. But quite often I hear something and want to listen to the rest of the album, or more by the same artist. It’d be nice to be able to quickly switch from a random order to album order with a couple of clicks, rather than having to navigate back through all of the menus again. Similarly it’d be useful to be able to jump directly into that artist’s music in my collection from the same screen.
And rather than having a “genius” in the software, why not a DJ? (And I don’t mean in a cheesy voice over style!)
If listening to your collection on random is listening to your own personal radio station, then where are the other “feature programming” playlsits that you get from real radio stations? For example how about randomly programming a “Blue’s Hour”, a Second Summer of Love special, a Radiohead retrospective, or a Mercury Prize Nominee playlist?
There’s plenty of metadata in iTunes and plenty more available from an increasingly wide array of sources, so why doesn’t the software provide us with a better interface onto it? Supported by slightly more sophisticated software agents to help navigate or use it?
Implementing some of this might be possible through iTunes plugins, but some of the features it’d be nice to have on the device. The hackability of the iPhone suggests that this might be a better platform for exploration that the iPod.