When experimenting with the sort order of albums in PSE11, I was surprised to see that in some albums, changing the sort order from 'oldest' to 'newest' did not produce any effect.
The reason of this probably lies in the menu /preferences/general :

If you have only pictures taken the same day, the above setting will still show 'oldest first' even you choose 'newest first' for album order.
I believe that the most used order is 'album order' and that the 'newest first' is very rare.
I can understand the option to browse 'oldest first within each day' when in 'newest first' in thumbnail view.
However, I wonder if that option makes sense to sort an album ?
Was it by design ?
If it were me...
I would not use that preference for an album,
and...
I would add the option to sort by filename and caption.