Hi mash, there are some other kinds of things where the selection order can matter, the main one I can remember at the moment is Loft.

For loft if you select each curve by clicking on it, it does make a surface through them in the order that you selected them. If you do something like window select a group of them then it tries to automatically sort them, but that can get confused if you have something like 3D swooping profile curves all at various angles to each other.

Network is a bit different because it takes 2 sets of curves that cross over each other, so it's able to use the crossing information to figure out how things relate to one another.

Loft is a one-directional thing and it doesn't have as much structure to the inputs to give it the ordering in all cases. But for simple cases like when the curves are all on parallel planes the automatic sorting in loft can figure out how to arrange stuff like that.

- Michael