Thanks for the reply Sid. The more I read through the documentation, the more I realize that the front end custom query and multi sort in particular would probably have to be custom coded as an extension or whatever Wappler uses to extend itself. I'll have to see what options it offers. As I said, these features seem obvious to me but I have never found them in frameworks or if they are in a framework they are too opinionated and I need them to be more flexible. I used ProcessWire before and it has a "lister" for doing custom queries but at that time it didn't work in the front end and it wasn't quite flexible enough.
I'll read up on what I'm in for as far as custom coding before downloading the trial. I do like all of the other features though so this may still end up in my toolbox.
Also the export features I need don't seem to be there either and have been requested since 2018... 