Kenwood Excelon DDX9905S - How do you use this thing?

[DigitalMan]

So I started running into limitations with Ford Sync. Too many songs and it will no longer index, etc. Decided to upgrade my factory radio with a Kenwood Excelon DDX9905S.

Now maybe I'm missing something or was spoiled by Sync but having a lot of issues with what I would think are basic things.

1) Shuffling all my music. With SYNC I just plugged in my USB device and it would randomly play all my music. With Kenwood it seems it only shuffled a single folder. So I put all my music into the root of the USB drive with no folder structure which is not ideal but now it randomly play all my music. It seems to me that if it supports playlists I could go back to having my folder structure on the USB drive but can't figure out how to do playlists. It doesn't seem to recognize m3u files.

2) Voice commands. It came with a new microphone so assumed this would be straight forward but I was wrong. With SYNC I could say "Play song ...." and it would play it. With the Kenwood I hit the voice button and say "Play song ..." and then it starts talking through my phone instead of speakers and can barely hear it since the receiver will go back to playing music over top of it. I assume the voice control is somehow working over bluetooth instead of directly with the unit itself. Is there no way to control it with voice directly? If I need to use my phone is there anyway to voice control music from the USB drive? When I plug my Galaxy S8+ into the USB port I can do weblink and Android Auto however it seems really buggy. I'll say "OK Google" and sometimes will come up on the Kenwood but then it will come up on phone after that. Tried using Waze once and started out fine then the map would go to about a 1/4 size in the upper left of head-unit and couldn't get it to go full screen. Trying to play a song over the android auto keeps asking for me to set a default music service up in the google assistant settings. But all my music in on my thumb drive. I don't want to stream it over cellular. Ugh.

Those are my 2 biggest issues. I love the large touch screen but really want to have all my music play randomly and be able to select a single song if I want through voice. Any help would be appreciated.