Its a pet peeve of mine too in that so many people dont even read the stickies and after all they are there for very good reasons.
IMHO part of the reason is smart phones and similar where scrolling on by and only looking at the first few things seems to be the tolerance level norm.
Older users do tend to read the stickies a little more and quite often even a first time older user will put together a decent post in a request for help.
No idea about the "sort fashion" so am no help to you there.
Code tags I think are a lot of peoples pet hate and there have been topics in the past about making it easier.
Some underlying issues relate to the forum software itself as it was "inherited" so some changes are quite difficult. The development team has a lot of other work to do but we have seen some minor changes at the front end (major at the backend)
Add to that the recent inheritance of a whole slew of arduino.cc web sites and the relevant data for the teams in the back room and you can see how they are overworked.
Do agree with your sentiments though...just giving a little background that I am sure others will add to greatly.