I am a web developer, its easy to understand what's happening here, that's why I did not insist. Essentially its to do with development priorities or simply laziness, both I can completely understand.
Lists are currently a first build of a much larger feature. Though I do not understand why it was not built in a complete fashion, considering its not that big of a task.
Essentially almost all options you see in the lists are one-off operations or simply buttons and not something associated with the list as the dropdowns suggest. So when you perform them and move away, it has no knowledge of what has happened.
For myself, the alphabetical sort only works if I go to edit mode, select it and save. That is, don't do anything else.
Though there is a bug in their page caching system, so sometimes it takes a 10 seconds to couple of minutes to reflect the change. Another frustration...
Another bug concerns the edit interface which essentially is formulating the order neither by Author's order or Alphabetical order, but the order in which you added the items. I strongly suspect that the db query is being ordered by the timestamp of creation of the relation rather than by the attribute managing the order. Its a simple mistake.
So even if you succeed in changing the order to alphabetical or order them manually, it is only reflected in the normal mode. If you come back to edit mode, it continues to show the itens in the order you added them. Too frustrating...