Recently the behavior of spotify changed; now, it appears it is impossible to make a playlist available offline without having it added to saved songs. 

Before this, I used to use my "songs" as a playlist, functioning exactly like the starred playlist did before they somewhat inexplicably replaced it, for particularly good songs. For instance, I added a 500+ song 'gym mix' playlist, and tried to download it, only to have it double the size of my 'songs' list--which was previously carefully curated, a timeline of the musical tastes and interests I had at the time. 

I think this is--by an enormous margin--the most common use case among spotify users. 

Now, however, if I want to download that playlist it dumps the *entire* thing into "my songs" 

Is there any way around this? 

It seems incoherent. It's trivial, or should be trivial, for the developers to implement a smart playlist that you can call "All Songs." Given that my musical tastes are not monolithic but instead very varied and context dependent it's not clear to me why that would ever be useful, but still. 

Allow us to download any song or playlist we want and allow us to select which playlists this effects. I like having a one-click option to add a song to a playlist (i.e., 'songs' or 'starred') of new discoveries, or particularly good songs, or what have you without having them be swallowed up by a deluge of other downloaded material.