FWIW, Because we don't make an entire course, back it up and then deploy it. We deploy our course in increments so that we benefit from formative feedback, and also a slow dev team. Also, teachers make changes and we ahve over 500+ items in a 9 month course. Moving them takes a while.
Instead we created a pre-fix system and prefix our descriptions.
At this point, Moodlerooms created a block that sorts just as want. It offers a chance to sort via cron job or sort manually. The gradebook look beautiful now.