I like organizing my music myself from different sources, and it seemed unfair on the part of iTunes to not a low me to do that.
However, I had to download the latest version to welcome the newest member on my musical journey, and I discovered that its downward compatibility extends to allowing manual playlist manipulation with the old ipod as well. The new one, my beautiful ipod classic 160, hitherto unnamed, still remains uninaugurated.
Maybe even the version that freaked me out had manual sync, but that I was too dumb and/or too lazy to check out whether it did. However, that doesn’t really matter because the newest version is what will make my day.