Sadly this is quite a major change to both core and the plugin.
Tough we use TopicQuery to get the lists of topics, we handle all ordering outside of TopicQuery in:
To complete this we would probably need to move it so “core” handles ordering here instead of the plugin doing its own thing. It is a very complex change.
On the upside we can potentially remove a bunch of code from the plugin.
Sorry but I got to put this bug on the backburner for now.