The idea of trying a sorting system isn't a bad one in theory, but one of our goals with the proposed idea of allowing players to develop their own, organic partnerships is to take the work of pairing people up off of the mods' shoulders entirely. As you've mentioned, moving to a purely sorting system would be more work, and unfortunately that's what we were hoping to avoid, so it is highly unlikely that we would implement a system like this fully.

We do, however, often have players stating general preferences in the 'Anything Else' section of the application already. Requests such as 'I would like my character to be paired with someone older/younger than them', 'They would work best with someone difficult/easy to get along with', and 'Don't pair them up with someone nice/mean', are things we sometimes see in addition to straightforward pairing requests ('[Character X] would like to be with [Character Y]') and are always taken into consideration above a strictly random pairing.

If we do not switch to a system where partners are made in-game, it is likely we would instead refine the language in the application itself, the application explanation, or both, to emphasize the fact that requests of any nature are honored to the best of our ability in tandem with our current RNG process.