No - to constant purging and Yes - to manual sort order!

[Jiroun]

Vortex devs, all this aggressive automation like not adding (or even removing if I understood correctly) the ability to drag and drop mods or forcing a long and boring purge after every slight change is a quite toxic things to do. Why are you choosing for us?

Argument about "better technical", "troubleshooting" and everything like that does not have anything to do with that. The deploy order and sort order are two principally different things, isn't it? Users can actually have mods sorted not by their deploy order and be fine! Cause obviously it's just a schematic view in the vortex ui, not an actual deploy order, which is.. well, what to say if it itself is one of the categories of sorting! And you have already added such thing as highlighting sorting, which is literally 1 or 2 steps away from manual numbering and drag and drop sorting. So what's your problem?
Purging is absurdly frequent, it would make sense, if it happened every deployment, but every single action? Even with mods that have nothing to do with a conflicting ones? Not only had to move from default symlinks to hardlinks to get rid of endless system admin requests, but now also started to simply removing conflicting files from mods just to save some time and also because another one absolutely crazy thing - conflicting files overriding each other even in a staging folder?! And won't be restored even after after disabling the mod?! So I have to either reinstall mod or access its achieved version! If this is not a bug, it's not okay.

[showler]

Deploy order is for assets.  Load order is for plugins.  Vortex's deploy system is designed to only create links/move files that "win" the deploy order conflict resolution rules.

Automatic sorting can simply be turned off and then you can order things any way you want.

Too frequent purging is caused by conflicting files in mods that get installed to the root folder, I believe.  People seem to have luck fixing it by simply installing the Script Extender manually rather than letting Vortex do it.

If you are talking about a game that none of this applies to then I apologize.  You didn't specify.