Hi Michael!
Something to get You going (your questions are not in my realm of direct experience with Hype).
Below are some links that may address many (all?) of your requests. I found them by searching the Forum using Audio Playlist as my search terms. There are other links within these threads as well (and sometimes related links at the side of a post); and regardless of the subject heading of the post, there is often other ancillary info that could prove useful, so I would at least skim the entire thread.
It would be great if Hype had just a little more option when it comes to multimedia (for us audio/video people),
You aren't alone in this regard. Look under "Feature Requests" and do a search on the Forum for audio~video related posts (not all feature requests show up in the "Feature Request" category) and "like" the posts that have suggestions that You feel are valuable (adding a "+1" to the thread is not as useful). The more likes there are for a feature request the better the odds it will make it into a future version of Hype.
http://forums.tumult.com/t/requested-example-of-autoplay-audio-tracks-in-sequence/5998
http://forums.tumult.com/t/functional-record-audio-player/5410
http://forums.tumult.com/t/creating-a-media-player-with-a-list/5728
http://forums.tumult.com/t/syncing-soundcloud-widget-with-timeline/2522