To all the people expressing their frustration, I want to remind you about the plugin that was mentioned above.
There is a plugin Obsidian Custom Sort.
It’s powerful, and has a long manual. But it has a few simple things you can quickly try too.
I finally discovered and tried it this afternoon, and I’m still reading the manual. It lets you create a file to manually sort, or use bookmarks to manually sort. And you can also sort using your own custom Properties!
So for example, I just made a “sortspec” that lets me sort my notes by my custom number property, “Priority”. So high priority files will go to the top. Or you could sort/group by Chapters or Projects, or whatever.
It can also group things via rules too, which I’m excited to learn and figure out. And it sounds like you can change how folders/files inter-sort as well.