Sorting and Grouping revisited

This isn't really a question, other than to ask, 'am I crazy for expecting
XSLT to be able to handle sorting and grouping gracefully?'

After a week of research trying to find out why I'm having so much trouble
doing this, I find this in the FAQ (under Grouping by attribute):

'There is no simple way of doing grouping in XSLT. In some cases it can be
done, painfully and generally rather slowly, by testing each item to see if
it is the same as the previous item. 
There is a proprietary feature in SAXON XSL to do grouping, the saxon:group
element. Give it a try.'

It seems to me the best bet for accomplishing what I need to do is to
restructure my XML.  As another member of this group noted, this is changing
the data subtly for a presentation reason.  This seems wrong.

In short, it seems as if the shortcoming is simply the lack of a way to
access elements of a sorted node list (as opposed to in document-order).  I
have read many archived messages from this group, but am I missing
something?

Best regards,

Mike

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