Thanks for the response Milko.
I don't believe that I had this issue using the 4.x releases of Orchestrator, so I'm trying to figure out what has changed. The order appears to be the same each time, so my guess is that Orchestrator 5.1 is presenting the data as the vCenter API provided it. I'm pretty sure that the order of the objects returned are not based on creation order as my data stores are all named sequentially via numerical order as they are created and these are also presented as unordered.
As for your second question, not having the inventory sorted is extremely problematic when attempting to find an inventory object (such as a specific VM out of hundreds) for use in a workflow. Our vCenter has all of the VMs separated out into folder based on the various applications systems at our datacenter. With over 70 application systems, finding a specific business system's folder is now quite difficult. As far as I know, there is no method of searching or sorting when using the default dialog to browse/select inventory objects as shown in the attached image.