Sansa Clip + and 16GB Micro SDHC card....

Removing the tags might not be the best thing to do. If I were in your place I would first try reducing the folder names, perhaps even to a single charachter or two, and of having a lower level of folder nesting. Even if you get rid of the tags and simplify pathnames you might not be able to have much over 8,000 songs visible(the song limit isn’t exactly 8,000). The general assumption is that for music people will use at least 128 kbps. A few years ago 64 kbps wma was also considered a standard, however now that high quality mp3 players generally have at least 4 GB of storage, the standard is to expect songs to be at least 128 kbps.