Calling a Smart Playlist From a Smart Playlist



I thought I’d try something clever with playlists, but I get a result I cannot explain.
The idea is to execute a playlist to see the best 30 movies for a given decade, three movies from each year (10×3, 30 movies).
Lets use the 1980’s as an example.
I have 11 playlists. One I call the master playlist, and 10 that I call the subroutine playlists.

The group of ten playlists are a playlist for each year of the decade. (1980, 1981, 1982…)
These playlists are built the same: find all movies for 198x, sort by rating, and return the top three matches.
When you execute these playlists individually, they work as expected.

Now I make a master playlist that calls all 10 subroutine playlists expecting 30 movies, but it returns every movie for the 80’s, completely ignoring the limit=3 in each of subroutine playlists.
What is going on? Can whatever it is be overcome?
Thanks