I have to confess, A lot of what I dislike about the itunes alternatives that are out there have to do with their aesthetics. I like being able to see the cover art of my collection. There are other things, but very little of it has to do with functionality.

When you say version, do you mean version of sound file? If so, you can set your preferences to download whatever quality you want. Mp3's are pretty low quality. Apple's default is AAC (or some acronym like that), which is higher quality. I download in loss-less which is the best quality, but it takes up more space.

I also think I'm one of the few ITunes proponents here, but it works really well for me. Immediate access to all your songs, syncing to Ipods, apple TV, cover art, and organization all make it unbeatable in my opinion.

Haha, I'm the kind of person who goes: "I don't want al that crap, just slows the software down, go away with your stupid album art and fancy effects".
"Grey is good" ;)

I think it is not necessary to buy iTunes music, maybe you can use the music converter - TuneSolo Apple Music Converter to store the songs in MP3, so that your song ID information will not be wrong.