Thanks for the screenshots.
We seem to discussing it all, and in an incoherent way that has made this thread very confusing.
For the purpose of this thread we can leave the channelsontop discussion behind as Dave's and your screenshots show the channels are in the correct order in the HD bouquets. The only explanation for lincsat not having the same order as you and Dave is that he is not using the same files.
This has never been the ABM swap behaviour... but for those that want it we could make a CustomMix file. This would avoid making a dirty workaround in what is currently very clean, non-provider-specific code in bouquetwriter.py.