vvanders, I believe you’ve worked in games so you might already know about how the PlayStation 1 kindof had radix sort baked into the hardware. The hardware had no Z buffer, so all polygons had to be ordered back-to-front using the Painter’s Algorithm for visibility. The hardware understood a linked list of polygons; as odd as that sounds. And, the standard practice presented by the API was to have a pre-allocated linear array of NOP list nodes forming a radix as the starting point for inserting sorted polys.

> it will happily beat other "faster" algorithms

When it applies, there are essentially no faster algorithms - it’s O(n) if the word size is constant (it often is), which cannot be beat asymptotically. kr sort is only asymptotically better if word size is considered variable.

It’s irrelevant if you have no radix to sort on - comparison sort is provably at least O(n log n) which is slower.

> It preserves ordering for keys with the same value

That's called a stable sort, and it's a standard property present in many sorting algorithms.