Yeah I know the sorts are kind of expensive but I forgot people were running this on low end machines. My idea was that it would be an option (off by default) perhaps even with a warning next to it about the computational cost.
I do still like your idea of a one-off sort, however short of dumping the table to a text file, manually sorting and then re-inserting it into the database I think we might be out of luck. It appears with sqlite SORT BY cannot be used with ALTER nor UPDATE unfortunately. 😥