Thanks, that’s illuminating, and good to hear about the upcoming API to retrieve firmware binaries. We’re currently doing that via github releases from a webapp in gh-pages, but that has CORS issues which requires jumping through hoops to get around. (But we jumped and got around!)
Ah of course, I didn’t think about the filename as the unique ID. Using the firmware filename is definitely workable since it’s also in the response of the firmware upload PUT request. (I know it has a defined format, but it’s kind of opaque and created by Notehub - not the same as the original filenames given, for understandable reasons, like uniqueness. If I may say, though, I’ve always found them a bit hard on the eyes. 
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We do have a built timestamp in the firmware::info, and these are visible in the metadata when expanding a firmware row in Notehub. But I’m not seeing that it has any influence on default ordering (and there’s no built column in the table to select that ordering nor in the API, which was updated about a month ago with varoius sort fields, but not built.)
I appreciate you looking for workable solutions, and suggesting using the version with an appended date. Is that handled specially by Notehub? If I’ve understood you correctly, and the version is sorted lexicographically or by increasing semver, then I don’t quite understand how the date would make any difference: 1.1.0.<date> will always come before 1.2.0.<date> no matter what the dates are when sorting on version.
I don’t need an immediate fix for this, was just wanting to share my experience in case there’s opportunity to address these. Having PATCH support would resolve the ordering, it’s only because I couldn’t do that and had to re-release that the order by creation date no longer gives the correct ordering.
And finally, one more feature request - kind of a long shot this one - firmware notes with formatting!! Markdown or html as well as plain text. We have a webapp that can be used to update firmware, and the firmware note includes a link to this app, prepopulated with the version to flash. It would be a sweet UX if users could just click the link rather than copy/paste it from the notes. Also, the notes have various sections (much like Notecard release notes) and bullet points. Some formatting there might help, although that’s a secondary concern. We could always just add a link to the github release, which has formatted release notes.
Thanks for indulging me, anything from this that you can put to the team as a feature request is much appreciated!