Another year has almost gone by and I guess it still isn't possible to manually rearrange the sort order in the COA. This lack of such basic user functionality forces us to work around it at huge investments of time. An earlier comment about such a feature being "locked away" so non-accountants won't screw things up makes sense, but only in Intuit-world. 

Once again, when I have a question about how to do something, I come to the Community to see the question has been asked before--and the answer almost always seems to be "You can't."