Oh brother ... I just spent about an hour trying to figure this out myself. I had my playlists in a nice order before this enforced alpha sorting. I hope there will be an update that will allow for some better customization.
Good news is ... I did find one leading symbol that will push your faves to the top! Without looking too ugly! And the voice command lady doesn't pronounce it!
Here it is: ª
... copy and paste!
It's a superscript 'a' used as an ordinal counter in spanish.
It'll sort as an 'a' but it's so tiny it doesn't look like much, at least on the ipod screen it's kinda just a speck.
eta: don't know about iDrive or how it might look in the car display
I have an alternative take on this problem:
I have just bought a Classic 160 Gb at Amazon few weeks ago and I have been facing the same issues as you.
I do not use Mac OS X, nor iTunes to sync. I run Linux and I use Media Monkey on a Windows VirtualBox Machine.
During the past two weeks I have tried everything that I could find. iTunes have not even been able to read my entire collection (strange, right?)
My findings
I have just restored the iPod firmware a few minutes ago. Started MediaMonkey and sync'd 10 songs from an ordinary random artist. Disconnected and the songs were there, nice. So the iPod is actually working. So far, so good, I have figured that out before.
However, in the meantime, while I was checking my library, I recalled that I have some songs from Japanese bands with Japanese characters in their names. Historically, this would be very error prone. So I did gave it a try, and sync'd 64 songs from that band. Disconnected the iPod and the songs were all gone.
So apparently the 2.0.4 firmware does not handle these characters very well. Check your library, make smaller tests. I am about to restore the iPod again and will try to sync some more files with normal ASCII characters. Will update you.
My old, now dead (waiting for a new disk), iPod, running 1.0.2 was able to hold those files nicely.
Best Answer
Sure, you can make those audio lessons appear as podcasts. In iTunes, right click your song(s) and select Get info (or ⌘ cmd+I). On the Options tab, change the Media Kind to Podcast.
The appearance is slightly different when selecting multiple songs, but is very straight forward