Personally, I don't see the need for this be tackled in Pd, since one has enough control in the patch to re-order scalars as desired. Rather, I believe dealing with this is best left to the patch author.
There would be two ways of forcing the author to deal with it:
example in the patch
unnecessary repeating commands to Pd's heaviest member, the gui) Both are a burden either to the user, or to the patch. Garanteing a stable behaviour would be better, instead of shortcuts.