Hey Ron!
Interesting perspective about sort preservation. Currently, in both Sandbox and Live (incl. Edit Live Database), the filters and sorting there are only for data navigation. These filters and sorting are not pushed to Editor.
If you want to have some data filtered or sorted on site, you need to do that on Dataset, which is different from Database collection.
There are many cases where this is really important. Imagine you have movies website, similar to IMDB.com. Now, one of your pages list all the movies, another one shows you movies of selected director, another one of selected actor, and so on. How could we otherwise build these different pages that all depend on the same movies collection, but require different filters and sorting set?