Events out of order or missing on iPhone, but OK in iPhoto

Not sure if I should be posting this here, or on the iPhone forum, or somewhere else... But here is what is going on.

My husband and I both have iPhones and we use iPhoto. We have one library, to which we both upload photos (from our phones or our regular digital camera). There has never been an issue with syncing the photos to our iPhones in the past. My husband has been using the 3GS, I've got the 3G. When the iPhone 5 was released new software (iOS 6) was made available. He downloaded it immediately, and right away we discovered that the Events on his iPhone were showing up in a different order than they are in iPhoto, but only on his phone. I checked iPhoto, and we do have it set to sort the photos by date. My understanding is that they events should appear on the iPhone sorted in the same manner in which they are sorted in iPhoto, but obviously that is not the case. I can't find any rhyme or reason to the way they are appearing on the iPhone. There will be 10 events from 2006, then one from last week, then events from 1998, then 2010, then to earlier this year...

To complicate things further we both ordered refurbished iPhones (4S) this week. Of course, both were upgraded to iOS 6 and now both phones are having the issue with the order in which the events are listed. In addition, a new problem has appeared which neither of us had before. Not all of the photos are syncing to the phone. For example, both phones were set up to sync all photos, albums, and events in iTunes. But when we sync the phones, his will display a different number of photos than mine. With almost 8,000 photos it would be remarkably difficult to figure out who is missing what, especially since nothing is in the right order, making it difficult to look at side by side with the iPhoto library. I think it is a problem with the photos syncing from iTunes. Case in point: Just now I connected one phone via USB to the computer. I removed all the photos by telling iTunes not to sync photos, to remove them. I verified they were no longer on the phone. Then I told it to sync all photos. At the top of the window iTunes shows "7753 photos", but in the progress bar it says "copying X of 5257 photos". There is plenty of memory available (no apps or music have been transferred yet), so why are nearly 2,000 photos not being transferred?

I am at a total loss on this one... You guys are the experts, at least in my book, so I'm looking forward to hearing what you all have to say!