Does Drupal offer a chronological sort module?

I know very little about the Drupal forum platform. I know it's open source, and I understand that it has modules which work with it kind of like how extensions work for Firefox. Add a module, change or augment a feature, right?

So, is there one, by any chance, to allow a member/user to choose a forced chronological order of replies? In the current climate, you can reply to any reply or to the topic itself, but if three people reply directly to the original topic and then a week later, someone replies to the first reply, their reply gets posted above the two replies which were made a week before.

Technically this "threading" system is more correct, as far as chronicling a discussion, but IMHO it's never been drawn right. On screen, it's just a mess. Visually, a forced chronological system looks better, though I suspect it's a matter of opinion. As a now 10-year vet of forums, I'm usually the first one in an online community to say something, not about the rules or the conduct of the members, but about the forum platform. And I have learned that most people just don't care, so long as it works. But, being more technically-minded here, I wonder what common opinion is, if one exists.

For those waving the WTF flag, here's a simple diagram. A, B, and C are replies to a topic (someone clicked "Add Comment" at the end of the topic). 1, 2, and 3 are replies to A (someone clicked the "Reply" button on A). 4 and 5 are replies to B, and 6, 7, and 8 are replies to C. Drupal (what we have here) displays the messages in the following order: A123B45C678. Invision, vBulletin, phpBB, and virtually every other forum platform I've used will do this instead: ABC12345678; however clicking "Reply" on a reply will quote it. (Invision has a cool feature where you can queue replies, and then when you go to reply, they're all quoted and you just reply to them all like a MySpace questionnaire.)