I think Carl was looking for something similar, though, to the ADDT Ajax function that allows you to reorder the column arbitrarily, so each item has an up arrow and a down arrow beside it... you then move things where you like and then click save at the top. It then rewrites an "order weight" column and you can then sort query by that same order weight column.
While ADDT is a dying animal, that was one of the good things it had... I am going to try to port that functionality into a stand-alone extension that could work with data assist.