@weirichk - then I am not exactly sure where the gap lies in what you have specifically said you want? Here is what you asked for:
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From my point of view where it could be of great benefit is when I have a series of books that are read in order (or I want to read in order).
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You already have this capability for books in a genuine series, which as you have pointed out is the series column you are currently using for that purpose. Others have confirmed the Sony has the ability to list books in series order. So for books which you have filled in the series column in calibre, there should be no need to "go digging" for published dates etc, correct?
That then just leaves three other scenarios I am aware of. The first is where you want to read the standalone books by an author in published order. That is where the "workaround" I suggested some people do can be used - creating a fake series name and putting all those standalone books into that series. There will be no conflict with existing usage of that series column, because by definition the books are not in a series. However I can completely understand if creating/maintaining a fake series sounds like filth - it isn't something I would do, but then I personally am not fussed about the published date for reading order of unrelated novels.
If you mean however that the author has written multiple series, and you want to read the appropriate series in published order, then I accept you have an issue. However if the series are related to each other, you have several choices involving renaming the series - either into one giant numbering scheme with a single series name, or multiple series which sort alphabetically - e.g. Foo 1 SubseriesX [1], Foo 2 SubseriesY [1] etc.
If the series bear absolutely no relation to each other, and yet you *still* want to read in published order - well, then your only options I can think of are again to prefix the series say with author initials or a year or something. e.g. 2000 Foo [1], 2010 Bar [1] etc.
Or you (and this applies to standalone books as well) could maintain some text file per author that lists series/books in publish date author. Kind of a poor man's catalog I guess. I guess it depends on how serious you are about published order, and how infrequently you have calibre open to help you "memorise" what book you would like to read next. Alteernatively perhaps the full catalog generation can output the information you want - i.e. ignore reading list and just use the catalog to allow you to see book published dates. I'm just "assuming" a catalog allows you to do that, I have never generated one.
The final scenario I can think of (which was not mentioned in your original post) is where you want to read completely unrelated books from multiple authors/series in a particular order - i.e. a "reading list" which is what this plugin allows you to maintain within Calibre. However we are all agreed that it is not currently possible to automate the replication of that reading list order onto a device, nor (as you reported) does the Catalog feature of Calibre preseve any ordering the reading list applies when viewing a list.
As per the recent posts with ac4lt that last point is something that could be partially remedied by allowing the plugin to support a custom series column. However unless people change their send to device templates to use that custom column, I can't see it helping with a reading order on the device.