The specific ordering of folder contents if very important for me - and I assume, for most people. While sorting is possible,it does not persist between page renders. Therefore, I'm having to sort the table whenever I load the page, since pages are not in the order I want whenever I click a folder to see its contents.

Perhaps you can store the sort preference on client side, either independently for each folder (which would be better) or as a global preference for every folder (which should also be possible, since every folder has the same set of 5 columns: name, created, edited, comments, and author).