For anyone who finds this, this is the best solution for us right now and it is absolutely infuriating to implement.
1.) Drag all of your desired folders into the inbox to force a group that is above the un-editable list of things like "notes" "conversation history" etc.2.) You will need to go through every single folder name and re-name them to include alpha-numerics to force outlook to sort them correctly.
If you happen to get some kind of "this is not possible" error message and the folder isn't sorting, you will need to hard restart outlook for it to behave correctly. (Essentially, make sure it's closed and not minimized to the system tray).
The moderator who originally responded to this thread claiming to use the "favorites" button to sort your folders to the top didn't account for subfolders being inaccessible. If you do it this way, your subfolders will still be reachable.
Microsoft if any of you see this, it is highly disappointing that you've ignored this problem for such a long time. You need to do better.
(And don't get me started on all the problems associated with your email rules system)