Thanks mate I do RE at a primary school and the kids always get a kick out of my last name, but in primary school I don't get to prove whether or not I actually live up to it!

I recently stumbled across somewhere in the manual where it talks about how the engine works, and it does indeed render the sky in the order I mentioned above.

I have no idea how much work it would be for conitec to implement a flag that switches the sky rendering from after the opaque stage to before it.

Jibb

EDIT:
If you render your model in the transparent stage and write to the z-buffer anyway, sorting errors shouldn't come up since d3d_entsort defaults to "1", which means transparent entities are sorted back to front.

Given how dark your sky is I'm sure your workaround is satisfactory anyway!