Thanks Rich for your support so far.
I just tried your 3rd option, and sadly still the sort function is ~20% off when I import into iMovie. For instance, in my album from our recent vacation, pics/vids start at the airport, then to the hotel, then for some reason some vids/pics of the airport again (we didn't go back to the airport day 1 of our trip).
I called apple support and they referred me to call the next level support.
In the past, the order or sort of my pics/vids within my albums in the Photo app would actively be shown in the iMovies link to it. When I would change the order in a particular album in Photo app, iMovie would also update in that order. Then I would simple drag and drop the photos in my album from within iMovie's pointer to the Photos app.
Today, that feature was removed and some Apple engineer decided to hardcode the order Newest to Oldest when viewing the Photo app's albums. Okay... why remove such a nice feature and hardcode it? And if you did want to hardcode it, why hardcode newest to oldest, it's not in chronological order.
Now, due to the regress mentioned above, I would jump through hoops of exporting to desktop, or to events or other ways, until now where either the photos are blurry beyond recognition or the pics/vids are not in chronological order.
Simply stuck at the moment.
-Rafid