I really like this. I can't imagine that the cognitive process humans use to order adjectives in everyday speech involves categorizing each adjective and memorizing an arbitrary ordering on those categories.
On the other hand, the category-ordering approach does have the advantage that it's an O(log n) operation, whereas solving the restrictive effect maximization problem is harder: a heuristic greedy search in the solution space might be O(n), and a true solution might be O(n!).
Some humans categorize every noun by gender and every verb by conjugation behavior... and even memorize multiple definitions and connotations for thousands of words.
On the other hand, the category-ordering approach does have the advantage that it's an O(log n) operation, whereas solving the restrictive effect maximization problem is harder: a heuristic greedy search in the solution space might be O(n), and a true solution might be O(n!).