Just to follow on from this.
I really couldn’t wrap my head around this. I installed a query debugger to find out what was going on when this was queried in the backend of WP. Whatever I did to try to fix it failed. I tried to add a ‘pre_get_posts’ action against the backend to force the order by meta etc. Looked at how the plugin was calling it etc. All looked fine. All should have worked.
… turns out I didn’t remove ‘Intuitive Custom Post Order’ which forces $wp_query->set( ‘orderby’, ‘menu_order’ );
??