Any progress on sorting taxonomies in 4.7?

I remember coming across several discussions on this subject, including propositions for patches to the taxonomy module, but have not seen anything about it in the discussions on Drupal 4.7. I would be grateful for any enlightenment that anyone can provide.

Here's a brief statement of the problem: when you display a taxonomy term with its dependent nodes (eg: www.example.com/taxonomy/term/9), then the nodes are sorted by stickiness and descending creation dates, in other words anything sticky appears at the top of the list and the rest is sorted such that the most recent nodes appear at the top of the list.

In my case, however, I wanted to do something different: I use the taxonomy (and the taxonomy_context module) to group together articles submitted at various times in a "series", where (logically) I want the series to start at the beginning, in other words with the first, not the last submitted node. In other words, I want the nodes sorted by creation date ASCENDING.

I could find no easy way to do this using existing functionality and contributed modules, so I ended up doing something I hate: hacking taxonomy.module as follows:
- added a new field "sortorder" to "term_data" table
- added four new fields to the term definition form, to allow four separate sortorders to be defined in descending order of priority
- modified the SELECT statements which find nodes for a term, to include the sortorder defined for the specific term.

This works for me, but there are a whole series of reasons for not liking this solution:
- deviates from standard
- much work involved whenever upgrading to new version of Drupal
- a bit clunky?

I seem to remember that there was a suggestion for patching taxonomy.module to allow it to be called with different sort orders (which would then be defined in an external module somewhere), but have not been able to find out whether this has been done or not.

At all events, I am sure that this is an area which could be of interest to more people than just me.