How is that different from physical releases that are identical except one that says “printed in W. Germany” and one that says “printed in Germany”, or different “CD manufactured by …”, or any of the other minor details that are useful for splitting physical releases?
Do you mean earliest added to MB, or earliest released? Earliest added to MB also gets messy with pre-NGS releases, since two NGS releases could have come from a single pre-NGS edit, I think. Earliest released isn’t always easy to determine, because sometimes there was an earlier release on some obscure platform that isn’t discovered by any MB editors until later. (I.e., I agree with you that splitting releases is better.)
Taking a step back, it seems like there’s some disagreement between 1) people who want a simple experience of just picking a release that’s close enough even if there are minor differences from what they have and 2) people who want correct details even if it means spending more time figuring out which release they have. Is that right? Could the solution be… more releases‽ Would having split releases for all the differences (2) care about, plus a single pseudo-release for (1) help? If those pseudo-releases were marked somehow, maybe Picard could be configured to prefer them for (1)?