2. Playlists versus views:
JRiver has regular play lists. You can find them in the left side Navigation Pane. Right click to add a new play list. Then you can add songs or even whole albums to your play list. You can drag them around at will to put them in the order you want. Playlists should work very similarly to other programs. They are just lists of songs that are already in YOUR LIBRARY.
When you use other navigation methods like Audio > Albums (for example), you're no longer looking at a playlist. Instead you're looking at a View of your music that's organized according to the View. These are all configurable so they will sort how you want them to. But you CAN NOT drag them around in these views, as that would break the sorting. For arbitrary ordering, you want play lists. For real organization by Album, Artist, Year, Genre, etc, you use Views.
The default Audio > Artists view lets you view by Artist. Then when you click on an artist, it will show you all the Albums by that artist and the Albums will be ordered (sorted) by Year by default, which is what you seem to want.
I should have started by saying that all of this View stuff assumes that your music has been tagged with the correct Album, Artist, song Name, Year, etc. That's what makes all of the Views work: metadata.
Brian.