I'm not sure. The index pages produced tend to have alphabetical things at the top ([a-d e-h], etc.), and the one that doens't is the one that lists the wrong thing as the title. To hack them to work would probably involve just as much trouble, if not more, than writing it myself.

What I'm using right now to produce the list of panelists on the website is a plugin called Sobek's Posts by Category which *might* be able to be altered to sort by a custom field, but I'd have to (a) look hard at his coding and (b) see if he allows for altering his code in his open-source license.