“Rather tedious,” yes indeed; welcome to the “secrets of the great tedium masters”. (Actually, I think the secret is that there is no way to manually sort feeds, and that I did it in exactly the same tedious way that you have already worked out, so I have nothing at all to tell you; but just in case …)
I’m a newbie myself, but the only tool I could discover for deterministically ordering folders and feeds is alphabetization (set under “preferences/general/site sidebar order”). So, as is common in many other programs, one just has to “arrange” for alphabetic order to be correct. Adding lexicographic prefixes such as (1), (2), (3) or !!!, !!, ! is the time-honored trick, going back 50 years, so that alphabetic sorting produces the desired ordering.
In the site sidebar list, right click on a feed gives you a context menu including “Rename this site”, so that’s how you make the names what you want. Then, within a folder, they will be alphabetic.
In the same context menu, there is also “Move to folder”, which lets you reassign a feed from its one-and-only-one folder location to a different location. If you really want a feed to appear in more than one folder (very convenient on Google Reader), then you need to create a duplicate feed in each folder.
Both the renaming and the moving sometimes appear not to work–it’s not clear whether the bug is that transactions are really lost, or that sometimes transactions take unrealistically long times to complete. Whichever, it’s necessary to refresh the webpage in the browser after every few changes, and if the changes just made are not visible to make them again. This adds greatly to the tedium.
As you say, all this work has to be done in the web app, and after it’s done and looks good there, the Android client won’t show the same changes. The only way I found to work around this was to uninstall and reinstall the Android client, which brings everything up to date. It’s very quick and nothing is lost, so I consider this a practical, if inelegant, temporary work-around.
I agree that Newsblur, in its design, dominates all the Google Reader alternatives you list and others besides. Even so, it is clearly not getting its proper share of refugees from GR. I think one reason is the difficulty of the transition. In Feedly, just as an example, owing to a very different set of design decisions a refugee hands in a Google account and appears to get an absolutely perfect import immediately–every feed in place, every name the same, every feed in one or multiple folders, and even two-way syncing with Google Reader for running in parallel while deciding whether to make the change. (The danger of the design decisions making that possible is not visible.) Even feeds which have “died” in GR have their corpses imported, with no mention that they were not working any more–a good decision, no red flags during import, plenty of time to fix the feeds later. After the import the experience of using Feedly is very poor, but you appear to be fully imported and ready to go immediately.
By contrast, in Newsblur I first had to repeat the import half a dozen times in order to get all my feeds (about 400), then had to manually rename most of them refreshing after every few changes, then had to manually move each to a different folder (nearly every feed was in the wrong folder because of the one-and-only-one design) refreshing after every few moves, then reinstall the Android client on each of several Android phones and tablets, repeating the reinstalls after every lingering error I’d made was noticed. The whole process took about 12 clock hours.
The problem is that the users most likely to appreciate Newsblur’s superiority are those who have a lot of feeds, who care about how they are presented, who can take advantage of the alternative presentation modes–and yet these users are the ones who meet a very stiff wall to climb in order to really see how Newsblur will work for them, and very likely won’t have the time to deal with it.
As a business decision, there’s only a month left before GR shuts down and the refugee rush is over; soon enough the only transition experience will be opening Google Takeout archives. At that point it will be a long competition of quality and performance, and Newsblur should do well.
And it will be a big question how they will perform when GR shuts down and they have to use their own back-end that they don’t do yet.