The problem with the "straightforward sort block" is that you often have to surround it with lots of other code to achieve the same results as the ST. At the heart of it, the sort complexity is the same and the difference lies in where you mangle the data into a sortable form and then extract it again. If I understand correctly, it is the Guttman-Rosler Transform that has a simpler lexical sort after the sort keys have benn carefully packed into a string.