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"The author's situation is extremely rare"

People sorting their files for alphabetical order is extremely rare?

And right now I fail to see even one 'case where someone wants "10" to be before "9"'

People sorting their files in alphabetical order but who want numerical values in their files to be sorted digit by digit instead of as numbers is the rare case.

I might go further in my ideal sorting algo which would be normalize capitalization and ignore all non-alphanumeric characters and treat them all as separators.

What you vaguely outline has already been standardised in UTS #10. The algorithm is both based on prevailing user expectations and also has shaped them since the wide-spread adoption of implementations.

> ignore all alphanumeric characters

There's not much left to sort by then, is there?

Good catch! Fixed.

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