Quisp, I've been trying to find a way to achieve the same thing you are with sorting. I thought I'd be smart and use the "album artist" field as my sorting field for artists with last name first, but ran into a problem. I thought that if I set up a view scheme by "album artist" it would display the reversed ("last, first") artist names that are in the "album artist" field while simply displaying the normal "artist" tags for any files that didn't have an "album artist" value. This would allow my track info pages and such to still display the artist name in normal form while allowing the precise sorting needed in the tree view. It didn't work out this way, though, as the view scheme continued to show just the "artist" fields.
By the way, I'm using 9.0.87 which has the new "album artist (auto)" field. What exactly does this do compared to the old MJ 8's plain "album artist"?
I would really love a way to sort as you requested for both artist names with last name first and bands with "the" in front, while still only seeing normally-formatted artist names.