This is just my take on it but I think you are requesting AS to do things that AS is not for. AS is not a media management piece of software. It's a tool designed to acquire media from providers. And it does that VERY well. In my mind there is no need to dilute its purpose as a acquisition tool as I see it. There are many pieces of software out there that do these types of things and they are great. Some are free and some cost a little. My personal thought on this is that we should use AS for what it's made for and use other things for other things.
I personally use a number of tools for my collection all designed to do different things. And some I do manually. For example the year thing. Even if AS could pull the year from the provider I would not use it because it's very often wrong. So for movies I always look them up on "Just Watch" and copy the name and year and change the filename based on that. Simple, accurate and works well.
My primary tool for organization and cataloging (which it sounds like you are after) is EMDB. Works great and it DOES auto pull title information and does find duplicates and so on and so forth.
Just my 2 cents man.
Me? No, I'm not after media management or expecting AS to do it for me, it's strictly for acquisition, like you said. I have a pretty good system for management/storage and already it's the first step after acquisition, when I also add DB index #s so that they can't be misidentified later. If AS had a direct place in that, it wouldn't be the top of the AIO chain, it'd just be a good tool to interface with like other acquisition tools -- some kind of API call from the management software when it sees that something told it I want is available for streaming from one of my providers. (Edit: TBH, I'd be happy with it even if it was even MORE single-purpose, and didn't have all the graphical browsing and integrated search function etc., just took a direct request to acquire the stream for a program that was specified and output a file for it-- provided that the capability to browse through catalogs and create that request did exist somehow, e.g. copy-paste a URL from the browser when watching X show at least, with the possibility of developing a more robust client.)
I was only pointing out that the year is basically part of the title for a lot of things, (which I imagine is only going to get worse as they continue to run out of ideas for titles,) and having some way to differentiate those would be good.. especially if it also meant I could acquire two where the only data I'm currently allowed in my filename happens to match; where I mentioned just being able to manually tag it when I select to download would be nice.
Incidentally, sometimes providers get the *title* wrong too, not just the year, and just because I know that when I click "download" doesn't mean I will remember when I actually have the file to manage, so that's another case where I wish my "save as" options for the filename were just a little less limited.
But yeah, that's not really the top of my wish list, that slot is probably for continuing to add other streaming services and the ability to save/resume a queue, (particularly in the event of a crash -- it's taking the time to dump all of memory anyhow, and until I hit OK the window that I'm not permitted to scroll in is still open, so I know the list it's about to flush is there to be saved). Was just seconding that there is a little bit of "nice to have" in that release year tag.