After combining advice I managed to get the various bits of fb2k to sort the same way by default.... Well after spending a bit of time trying to work out why the Playlist View right click Sort options were greyed out. I haven't sorted that way before, and I fully expected a Playlist View sort option to be found when right clicking on a playlist tab (why isn't there one?) and eventually I realised the Sort options require the highlighting of the tracks that require sorting. For some reason I went in expecting the Sort options to sort all the tracks in a playlist, so it took a while for the penny to drop.
For anyone who cares, I used the following syntax to remove the non-alphanumeric characters when sorting.
$caps($left($replace($stripprefix(%title%),!,,#,,'',, ,,'(',),1))
I followed anamorphic's advice and added an additional (hidden) Facets column for sorting it's own Title column, using the syntax above.
For "Preferences / Facets / Library Default Sort Order" I used the same syntax and it also replaced the existing title sorting under "Preferences / Advanced / Display / Default Sort Patterns". Including the default sorting methods, the whole thing now looks like this:
File Path=%path_sort%;Artist=%artist%|%date%;Album=%album%|%discnumber%|%tracknumber%;Track Number=%discnumber%|%tracknumber%;Title=$caps($cut($replace($stripprefix(%title%),!,,#,,'',, ,,'(',),1))
And I added $swapprefix to my Facets and Playlist View title columns to make the sorting a little better. Something like:
[$swapprefix(%title%)]
The only minor annoyances are numerical sorting (titles beginning with numbers) isn't quite the same as when they're sorted by title, and titles beginning with a non-alphanumeric character are always placed at the top of the tracks beginning with the same letter. For example, a track with a title such as "(Try A little) Tenderness" is placed before any other titles beginning with "T," rather than being sorted strictly alphabetically, but it's definitely better than it was.
Thanks guys.