I've researched order preserving encryption before but the tradeoffs (mainly that the attacker can tell the order and use that to narrow the search space) always seemed like high risk.
High risk compared to what? The alternative is absolutely no privacy (status quo) or no/limited functionality (not very useful). Seems like strictly better than having no privacy.
Using fake encryption is much riskier than no encryption, because if you think you are safe you will do unsafe things with your data. If you know you are unsafe then you will take appropriate precautions.