After a morning of frustration chasing down error messages and trial/error placement of the sort. It did not end up working where I thought it should go. It ends up I had to read the per column data before printing, NOT before storage... otherwise the data did not retrieve properly.

Because the print buffer was a dictionary data structure, the sort ended up as a one line operation using a lambda function anyway. It turns out it was easier to do in a lambda while getting the desired result. -X['count'] and X['MDR'] were the sort criteria that ended up providing the desired result. The default behavior for sorting is ascending, the minus sign was added to the count to indicate descending.

Running the version 5 before the version 6 allowed verification of data integrity via place by place comparison. 

The end result is each column sorted by frequency descending, and where those frequencies are the same, they are sorted by draws since last appearance ascending.

The 14 days of the paper play are up on this coming Wednesday, but the results were not very impressive so far.

On the bright side, it worked as easily when the input was changed to a pick 5 file.

This ended up being more of a challenge than I thought it would be, but those end up being the entertaining ones when the run finally produces no syntax or semantic errors. Ended up adding 20 lines, but many of those are comments describing the function of each step. The program still runs in under 10 seconds!

The goal was to help with the long standing column synchronization problem. Time will tell on that goal.