UPDATE: The final task in my transition to a Linux environment was to customize a powerful music library manager and player to work for my needs.
The most intriguing contender was gmusicbrowser - a robust utility with impressive handling for libraries in excess of 100,000 tracks, and best of all - a fully-customizable interface.
This evening I came upon a magnificent library of gmusicbrowser interface layouts from
vsido.org with an accompanying step-by-step installation guide. After about 30 minutes of perusing the 40-odd layouts bundled in the collection I came upon one which wowed me. A few minor tweaks later and I found myself with a large library manager and player with an incredibly powerful interface which permits me to fully-indulge my metadata fetishism.
Have a look - this is better than anything I had Windows-side! Highly recommended for Linux users with archival collections!