Steve,
I'm glad to hear you are finding this feature useful!
I really like your idea of specifying a tag order. That adds a whole new dimension of flexibility. I can't believe I didn't think of that before. It seems to obvious that it should work that way in hindsight.
I don't see any reason why we can't make this the default behavior. It's probably very rare that someone would not have already ordered the tags this way already, just out of instinct. I'll check, but I'm pretty sure it won't be a problem.
Can you file an issue in the issue tracker for this?
Cheers,