I'm attempting to import a library of content and it's very important that Plex is able to automatically assign names to each "episode". Manually cranking through each one and updating the tags within the app's interface simply isn't feasible because there are currently 4000+ individual "episodes". There's also the potential for Plex to chuck some of the custom names during subsequent re-scans (which happened to me a few times while cleaning up my music).
The content is education and training series from sites like Lynda.com and Udemy. The most "correct" suggestion I've found for sorting this particular type of content seems to be storing and naming as TV series; sorting by categories (or "type") and using seasons to separate individual courses.
media/
tv/
[...]
learn/
[category_name1]/
[...]
[category_name2]/
Season 01/
[...]
Season 02/
[category_name2] - s02e01 - [episode_name1].mp4
[category_name2] - s02e02 - [episode_name2].mp4
[...]
Season 03/
[...]
Categories are used in place of "shows", and episodes are named using the format listed here when including "Optional_Info" (no idea why this is actually documented if the optional_info is "ignored by Plex".... even for local media assets?)
Anyway, after reading through this thread I ended up using kid3 to make sure all metadata has been wiped and then manually include meta for the title only. Additionally, I've gone through the "Plex dance" a few times, moving a handful of seasons to a temporary dir, emptying trash, cleaning bundles, etc.
Ex: /media/learn/Code/Season 09 [Introduction to Python]/Code - s09e11 - The Range Function.mp4
--> meta-title: The Range Function
Beyond providing the title in the filename and in the metadata, I'm not sure how else to communicate to Plex the episode names.