Is the a way to change the order of objects in the outline instead of alphabetical order?
In 2.80 there’s you can turn off alphabetical ordering, but I’m not entirely sure what that does (Order of creation, maybe?)
However, a good habit (In my opinion, at least) is to have a lot of details in your object naming to improve the ordering of related objects.
For example:
robot.arm.L
robot.arm.detail_parts.L
gun.body
gun.mag
They might get long sometimes, but it vastly improves scanning the list.