Well, in this case, I am a old Salty Dog, and the "trick" is really a software capability that I wasn't aware of, or (more likely) I was too lazy to try using!

I happened upon a AVSIM forum post yesterday that popped up on a Google search for something not even related. Apparently FSDevelopers software, AI Aircraft Editor has a function for renumbering the aircraft.cfg file entries! All these years, I have manually renumbered the entries, after adding new textures. Oh, and apparently there is another older application called "Renum" that will perform the same task. I don't have a link for it, but you can easily locate it in a search.

I am probably in the minority of folks who was unaware of the above, but hey, better late than never! NC