MBS-4980 was reverted because it led to page loads taking ten thousand times longer than without it. That's clearly problematic, but the goal of that ticket is still desirable, and regardless of that we actually already allow catalog number sorting on release tables. While this is currently only available on collection pages, and being user-initiated rather than running every time probably makes it less problematic, we should probably still look into it and see if we can avoid the issue somehow before we expand sorting to all release tables.