What you may be talking about is something that has vexed me in Lion, as well.
It seems that there are two separate but also interacting ways of working with files now: Item Arrangement and Sort by.
To get back to the traditional view, turn of Item Arrangement by selecting the button to the right of the gear button at the top of a Finder window. I don't how to describe it except to say that the icon contains a horizontal line with three boxes underneath it followed by another horizontal line with another three boxes underneath it.
From there, select None, which takes you back to the traditonal view, where you can select how you want items "arranged" (I guess that's the new term) and then whether you want them sorted in ascending or descending order. That system makes much more sense to me.
If, however, you want to stay in the new UI, you can go to View (in the menu bar), Show View Options, and for some but not all of the "Arrange By" options you can additionally select a Sort by option.
Add this to the fact that there are four other views (icon, list, column, and cover flow), which are all interoperable with the two UI pardadigms (the traditional and Arrange by) and I would say the Finder in OS X is now a mess.
The only one that makes sense to me is the traditional list view.
I don't even think I am explaining well how the new system doesn't make sense because I can't even understand it enough to point out how it's illogical. But I guess the short of it is that moving between the traditional new interface is not an obvious maneuver for the casual user, given you have to use this new icon and that selecting from that icon "None" isn't really arranging by None in reality. Selecting None while in list view actually gives you back the old interface where the items are arranged (or sorted if you will) by whichever heading at the top of the window you've chosen. None to me would indicate random order, which isn't the case.
Anyhow, I hope this helped maybe even a little bit.
