My idea (wish, if you wish.. no pun intended) is actually quite simple: wouldn't it make sense to enable sort order setting for templates in addition to individual pages?
I think it makes sense, and have recently had the same wish. Adam brought this up a long time ago, and I've been meaning to add it, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. Now that there's been another request for it, I'll push this forward sooner rather than later. Actually now that my mind is on it, I think I'm going to work on it over lunch break.
The plan is that when you select a default sort at the template level, the option no longer appears with the page (i.e. template setting, if used, overrides page). If you select 'none' (the default), then it can still be set at the page level.
Also: current default sort value for new pages is "none", which can produce quite peculiar effects - apparently because DB itself uses some very obscure magic for deciding sort order - and I'm having hard time figuring out why anyone would wish it to act like this. As a second idea, wouldn't it be nice if default sort order was "created" instead of "none"?
When no sortfield is set, pages sort ascending by the database field 'pages.sort'. When you create pages in the admin, they should get added in the order you create them, as ProcessPageAdd manually sets this. That would look like 'created' order. But when you create pages in the API (or any kind of import process), and don't set the 'sort' field of a page, then they are all going to have the same sort value (0), which makes order unpredictable. I actually modified that yesterday when I was fixing the drag-sort issue that smd found, and committed it this morning. Now $pages->save() takes care of setting a $page->sort value if you don't, so it should be more API friendly. The reason we don't want to default sort by something like 'created' is for the reason Antti mentioned (no ability to manually sort).
