Yeah, and that's the only way to do it. A method which has many flaws:
a) Every field you wish to sort by must be currently showing, otherwise it's just a pain to add the columns and remove again
b) You need to do it for each and every playlist, individually, rather than simply loading a preset
c) The sorting doesn't stay permanent. In other words, add files to a playlist and they simply add onto the end, rather than amongst the playlist where they ought to be
d) For the Recently Imported playlist, which is constantly emptied, sorting goes completely out the window. It simply just sorts by some default method each time (which is Date Imported i think). This makes it very annoying to do something as simple as Fill Track Numbers From List Order, for it means adding columns, that you don't particularly want, every time.
Because of these disadvantages, the Remove Order option and more importantly the Sorting Presets were designed. Now, in MC11, the former is gone and the latter appears to be disfunctional.