Shop by "Attribute(s)" - Recommended Development Approach

[duffner]

We find Virtual Categories very powerful and can handle many complex "Shop by" approaches. However, we've encountered a project where there are almost 1000 brands that we'd like to create a filtered shopping experience for.

Goal: We'd ideally like to achieve the same result as Virtual Categories with Generate Subcategory Root Tree enabled, filtered by "Brand", but without creating 1000 categories in the admin panel. Any recommendations on approach? I feel there are many ways to solve this problem, but I'm a little stuck on what the "Smile" recommended approach is.

As a URL we'd like to acheive www.domain.com/[attrbute_code]/[attribute_value]

I certainly appreciate any help you can provide, or any code samples that can be reviewed to create a quality implementation. I thought I saw something in the docs at some point about solving this problem, but can't seem to find it.