Found the solution to my own question, and have applied a dope slap to my forehead for having missed this for so long.
On both the thread view of the messages and an individual message thread itself there is a link at the upper right side of the screen just above the first item displayed that reads "Date" and that has a tiny up arrow or down arrow next to that word depending on how you toggle it. As it turns out, the main view of the message threads as a group was set by default to display in reverse chronological/newest first order. The view of the messages in a single thread was set by default to display in chronological order. Simply clicking on that Date link to flip it to reverse chronological within a message thread gives me the messages from newest to oldest. This forum is much easier to read when that's the case! Brian
