Replying to Hal, and in reverse order, for convenience...
Hal's hack does nothing more than relocate the folders in a list view "Kind" sort from the middle of the list to its top...useful, but inapplicable as respects what I'm looking for.
V1's suggestion covers only icon view...not all views.
grelber, on the other hand, gets a brass ring on this go-round (in one of those fortuitous instances in which an "under the hood" change in OS X that nobody's stumbled on gets discovered by somebody who doesn't know enough to know it's not there and goes looking for it). (Edit: I note that had grelber not researched Lion's functionality the changes to Leopard and Snow Leopard may never have come to light.)
If my memory serves me, "Kind" sorts were possible only in list view in Panther; fast-forward to Leopard, though, and they turn up as command-J options for icon and column views, and fast-forward again to Snow Leopard, and they are Finder work-wheel options as well.
The sort algorithm changed a bit from
Leopard to
Snow Leopard (exact same folder), and neither of the two is precisely what I'm looking for, but I think either will suffice.
I checked VersionTracker every day for years, and I've checked MacUpdate daily since VT's demise, and I've never run across anything offering "Kind" sort functionality, although you'd think that somebody would have noticed the change in OS X and taken advantage of it (
or maybe it's not possible [*]).
Thanks to all for kicking in.
[*] See next post.
