Steven Zahm@ Rich
The short answer is, yes, I do think the Custom Entry Order extension will meet your needs.
With this you could set the order of the entries you wish to have list top and in a specific order.
To set an entry to display at the top, you would set the entry order to 1. To have an entry show second, after the entry assigned to 1 you would assign that entry the order of 2. If there is no entry assigned as 1, then the entry assigned 2 would actually be first.
That said, I would recommend setting order by 10’s or even 100’s. This will allow you the opportunity to insert entries in between others. For example having entries assigned orders of 100, 200 and 300 would display those entries in that order at the top. So you could insert an entry in between 100 and 200 by assigning the order as 150.
When filtering by category, the entry order would still be applied.
Hope that makes sense!