Although we did have a lot of discussion about being able to sort by name, this turned out to be not much of an issue for me in the beta swap. Go through the list before the swap starts and "star" the things you're really interested in -- I used a system where I gave 5 stars to 5 items, 4 stars to 5 items, etc., so that I initially had 25 things "starred." I figured if I got 25 packs of seed it would be well worth my mailing costs. After things got going, I marked (and picked) more things...
There is also a "recent events" feature that you can follow to see when new things are added, which I thought was helpful.
I do agree wholeheartedly that whenever possible, linking the list entries to the database makes things much easier, especially with plants that a person isn't familiar with.
