EarG
Head-Fier
I'm not going to go in to too many details but Fiio just released FW 2.02 BETA for the X5 which addresses this issue and it works very well in my opinion. Given that the X3 and X5 share much of the same FW I imagine it'll make it's way over to the X3 soon enough.
I have to point out that for a new entrant to the DAP market (yes, two years in is relatively new) that Fiio has done an admirable job of producing a low cost, powerful, great sounding player for the masses, and they are constantly addressing the concerns of the end user. If the audio quality is not as important to you as the UI then you should look at other players perhaps, or enjoy the SQ and live with the current limitations.
Also, your preference of jumping to all artist songs right away may not be someone else's who would prefer to play individual albums by that artist, can't please everybody.
UI is everything in almost all applications - I completely aware of this 'cause am was once a software developer/programmer myself. In DAP, UI is as important as the SQ. Actually it's not a limitation of X3, the FW 2.X, under Category, the play by Artist, Album and Genre works as it should. Come on guys, nobody among us here is new/stranger on how should be a music player basic UI works - look at Winamp and Foobar2k, etc, etc.
Kudos to Fiio for the new UI look though. But I'm reverting to the older FW for better functionality since, to my ears, the new firmware didn't do anything good to X3 SQ-wise.