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There is nothing "random" though I agree it can appear so - there is always a specific reason why each and every book appears in a particular sort order. However I do also agree about author sorting being overly complicated to use in calibre. There is a rationale and a history behind why it is the way it is but I too felt like binning the product when I first used it for the fact that unless you get a number of hidden levers configured correctly it just won't display in a way that made sense to me.
I've explained above what it is that you need to do, and I can tell you for a fact that it does work - you won't have multiple collections for an author on your Kindle, nor will you have to endure the pain of manually editing Kindle collections. And rows will not sort "randomly" on screen if you have configured calibre correctly for your author sorts. It is knowing what that "correct" that can be difficult to figure out. People will help you on these forums to work through the issues as they did for me when I struggled with it if you want them to.
For myself I intend to be maintaining an ebook collection for many, many years to come and fully expect that calibre will be the software to do that for me (across a range of devices, I don't expect it will be a Kindle forever) so tying myself into Kindle or Sony specific software makes zero sense to me. So some hours of effort to figure it out once and then never have to bother about it again was worth it for me, but you may prefer not to. As you say calibre does a *lot* of stuff that a lot of users love to make use of and will continue to be dramatically improved - only you can make the decision as to whether it is the right fit for you.
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