Yes, you asked this before. Two comments:
- It is not easy to gather those statistics, because the queries have to be language specific. It is not enough to look for prefix strings like 'The ', 'A ', 'An ', etc. An English-language title “The Best of Jim” would have a different sort name. But a French-language title “The et café” would use the Release Name as the sort name.
- Right now I’m interested in proposing the Style Guidelines. The statistics of how many Release (Groups) actually need a different Sort_Name from their Name is a question of implementation, of improving existing entries to meet the new guidelines. How will that information affect what Style Guidelines we set?
Maybe. It depends on your personal preference. As I mentioned in “I have been thinking deeply about Release sort names, and I have come to some conclusions”, “There is no one true sort order.” You might sort a title like “Mr Brightside” one way, and I might sort it a different way. It is the user’s client software (or tagging software) which will decide what rules to apply to names like these.