An example is below that is quick and dirty and shows what I'm trying to do. There isn't an error when the query is executed, yet the sort doesn't work and fails sighlently. Is there another way to accomplish the same thing?
SELECT attribute, property, descid FROM list AS l JOIN descriptor AS d ON l.descid = d.id WHERE l.id < 4 ORDER BY name;
Change that to:
... ORDER BY CASE WHEN d.name = 'attribute' THEN attribute ELSE property END;
And it should give you the desired results.
The structure of an SQL command cannot change in response to data so you need to account for all possible values in the "name" column and choose the desired column to pull the data value from when you write the query.
The whole point of "ORDER BY <column_name>" is that the values in <column_name> are compared to each other and the final sort order of the output corresponds to that comparison order. When you ran the query it sorted the four "attribute" valued rows which, as they are all equal, basically means no sorting. It worked just fine, it was just your expectations or understanding of how sorting works that was incorrect.
(This answer, in less detail, it what I posted to Reddit though it got buried deep in a reply chain)