AirPlay is Broken

At some point in the last few months, Apple degraded the user experience with AirPlay and the HomePods. I used to be able to play music on my speakers via an "iPhone -> Living Room" option. Now, I can only handoff to the Living Room option, which is a combo HomePods/AppleTV thing. I can control the music playing out of the speakers, but it's not really my Apple Music library. It's a facsimile of it. And that's the real problem. It doesn't retain "favorites", gives me an "Add to Library" option for songs supposedly playing from my library, does not allow for rating tracks, and play counts do not increase inside my iTunes smart playlists. When viewing on the iPhone, it doesn't even let you look back through the history so you can update Favorites or ratings from there. It's all very frustrating because it used to work exactly as I expected it to.

I've troublshooted by turning on/off every single setting I can find on my phone, HomePods, Apple TV, and Apple Music apps. No luck. The problem is such that no amount of specificity in my Google search terms can filter to it. I suspect that once you set a pair of HomePods to be the default audio for an AppleTV, those HomePods are no longer findable on their own to AirPlay to. They disappear as their own thing which can AirPlay.

My hope is that my personal use case has fallen into the cracks between one update and the next within something in the Apple ecosystem, and that an upcoming update will realign it all. That AirPlaying music will once again be possible.