[cartman.dos]

I have played around a bit more with this and I'm pretty sure you can replicate this behavior. When making a smart playlist using Tags as a rule and sorting by either Random or Sort title it is sorted correctly on the Bingie home screen however when using Year to sort it is listed alphabetically on the Bingie homescreen widget but when I go to playlists and select it the playlist is sorted correctly by date. It's kind of driving me nuts. When you get time could you please test to see if you get the same results?

after a lil searching I came across this thread which users have the same problem and it seems to be skin related. https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=321691   

 I'm running into the exact same problem, i have a smart playlist made with Tags and when i sort it by year it will show up in the correct order everywhere, except for on the homescreen widget, there it's sorted alphabetically.    

It appears this is a Kodi issue and not sure if Cartman can do anything to help us remedy this issue. I do have a work around for this altho it sucks and it is time consuming. Tags default sort order is the order in which they are added to your library so what you can do to get them in order of release date is manually refresh the items of your tag one by one starting with the earliest and progressing from there. I did this for my Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings/Hobbits, James Bond collections and a few others will work as long as the same movie isn't listed in multiple tags.  

better post an issue on xbmc git so devs can review it, it's 99% kodi-related.
what can be done to overcome this is somehow sort the already 'sorted' playlist.
I don't know where the problem lies exactly but would be interesting to test if I set a container and sort it by year then give it the playlist what will be the outcome (this involves coding)
other than that, can also try making a playlist, set rule to 'playlist', operator 'is' value '<playlist-tags>' and sort it by year.
even if this works, these are still just patches not a real fix.