Regarding my first point in the previous post:
If I have a 100-song playlist and I load all 100 songs into a taste profile, then generate a playlist using catalog-radio and specifying that taste profile, the results are unacceptable. The song selection is all over the place.<<
That observation is not correct.
I just tried again -- 100 song taste profile and generated a 2000-song playlist. Adventurousness =1, Variety =1 and Distribution = wandering. The songs returned by echonest seem to be appropriate choices based on the original 100 songs.