[sokoloff]

Do many use cases need lexical ordering for the encoding of the UUID? (The UUIDs themself would still be ordered; it's just the human/URL/wire encoding that isn't.)

Most of the use cases I can think of where I'd want an ordered UUID, I probably wouldn't need to lexically compare the encoding of multiple such IDs (where I can see plenty of utility in the ability to compare the underlying IDs).

[kiitos]

For sure yes! There are tons of situations where you need to use the string form of an ID, e.g. filenames, and you definitely want the lexical ordering of files in a directory to be correct.

[Izkata]

I've always seen the human encoding as the main point, so you can infer things about them while working with them. A database, for example, would have a datetime column that can be used instead most of the time.