This may be fixed with the forthcoming reverse sort order feature, but if not I'll enter this.
Librivox publishes volunteer, public-domain audio books. One way they make them available is as RSS feeds where one "episode" in the feed is a chapter or two.
The publication dates of the feeds however are in reverse order. The publication date of a chapter is one second after the next chapter. So sorting by date has the chapters in reverse order. I asked them why on their forums and they said because most podcatchers (including iTunes) sort feeds from most recent to least recent.
They actually show up in the correct order when looking at the feed itself in DC, but on the audio playlist screen they are backwards so that you cannot just autoplay through the chapters.
I tried the "always sort" option but it had no effect.
I'm pretty sure the new date sort is going to solve this for you. You can set ascending/descending.
I can see why pc podcatchers would always sort, but on small devices with limited cpu and memory, it's much more efficient when feeds are created with the newest items at the top. That way, DC would have to only parse through the first 10 items of a feed instead of a much larger number, because you need to get them all to sort them.
Let me know if the date sort doesn't work and we'll see what we can do. It'll probably get released in the next few days.
Thanks for posting.