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What you're trying to do is use the order of the books to store information about which group each book belongs to. I suggest going the opposite route: Store the information about which group each book belongs to, and have Calibre use that to determine the order of the books.
I'll admit that this method takes a bit of work to set up, but once you do, it should be almost as fast as manually rearranging the books.
Step 1: Create a custom field for the group. It should be just an ordinary text field.
Step 2: For the first book in each group, you'll need to fill in the name of the group manually. Because this is based on the cover, I assume all books in the group have the same title, so name each group after the title. (This is arbitrary; you can use any naming convention you want)
Step 3: Once you have a book in the group, the group's name will show up under that field in the tag browser. For subsequent books in the group, you can just drag them from the book list onto the group's name in the tag browser. This should be no more work than what you were wanting to do: drag and drop to reorder the books.
Step 4: Periodically click on the header for the group field in the book list to re-sort them by group. This makes Calibre do automatically what you were trying to do manually.
Not only does this accomplish what you're trying to do (put books in the same group next to each other in the book list), but it also allows you to easily get your sorting back if you need to temporarily sort on different criteria.
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