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Also, the cash advance interest differential for credit-cards, which is higher, and only paid off after all other charges are covered, rather than any sort of temporal ordering

FWIW, in Canada credit card issuers are required to apply payments to whichever balances you're paying the highest interest rate on -- it's not even temporally ordered.

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Are you complaining that they're required to service the more expensive (to you) debts first? Why?

UK banks used to have a god racket (don't know if they still do, don't read the relevant blogs) where they'd offer 0% balance transfer cards but with expensive purchase interest. Then, any payments you made went to paying off the oldest debt first (on which you were paying 0% interest) leaving the purchases quickly gaining high interest payments.

No, not complaining. (It doesn't affect me anyway; I never pay any interest.) Just observing that in Canada the rules work to the advantage of consumers and the sky hasn't fallen yet.

I think the UK is now like Canada; payments to the card issuer must now be offset against the dearest loan first.

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