Ah, that's a bit more involved than what I've just thrown together vs how things are handled within the podcast root node view.
What I've added for now is shown in the attached screenshot where it'll run through all of the podcast feeds & either add all episode entries within a feed in chronological order (it won't apply that overall but each grouping of episodes from a feed will be date sorted) or only the newest one into the main playlist.
Am now expecting that's not really going to fit with what you were hoping for now you've clarified what you were looking for.
-dro
Yeah, it's not quite what I had in mind, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
You will have to compile your feeds into a single feed using an online RSS aggregator.
I'll look into this.
I've been thinking about it a bit more & a local library podcast filter view would probably do most of what's needed (assuming the podcasts get added to the local library database but ignoring the episodes that have yet to be downloaded) if it's just a means of seeing what there is.
I know I'm being very particular now, but this wouldn't quite fit my need, because I'm hoping to be able to not download podcasts any more, because I listen to a ton of podcasts and usually my playlist gets populated quicker than I can listen to them so the result is a ton of HDD space taken up by podcasts.
That's why being able to not download podcasts any more and handle everything through streaming would be a hugely useful functionality for me and I'm assuming a podcast that isn't downloaded wouldn't show up in the local library.
Really what I'm after with the feature I'm describing is a place where I would be able to click on one feed and in that one feed see whether there are any new episodes of any of the podcasts I'm subscribed to (which I would know without the episodes being marked as new, I'd be able to tell what's new because I remember what I've already listened to).
Right now, I'm subscribed to like 20 podcasts if not more, so to check for new episodes I have to click through each and the biggest thing is I forget sometimes to even check certain podcasts, so a single aggregate feed would solve that problem.
Alternatively, a variant of the downloads view with it set to show everything (downloaded or not) might be a better way of seeing everything in one go vs an 'all' option in the existing podcast root. As that's going to make it easier to then have all of the information listed vs doing a specific setup for one item in the root view. I get that it's also adding more to how things work so I'd need to have more of a think but it might be suitable as a toggle mode in the existing root view plus it'd help to implement part of the wanting to search for things aspect.
Either way there's options to consider as I don't think the pre-aggregate your feed approach is a viable solution when all of the information is there locally, it's just getting it into a valid state to work with. That's the main why reason I can't just suddenly change the existing root view & an 'all' item as it's been based around only seeing on feed & it's episodes at a time instead of just showing things however & all jumbled together.
-dro
I'm not familiar with the downloads view, but if it could be modified to do that maybe that could do the trick.