It's been said plenty before, but I'm compelled to post again because of the level of frustration this is causing me. 

Why oh why are we given such limited control of the order in which feature lines, annotations, etc. are displayed in a drawing?! What I'm trying to do is so painfully simple and basic, and yet there's no functionality for it.

I'm making a drawing for a retrofit, I want the existing features to be displayed in a lighter shade of grey. That part is easy, just select the corresponding components and put them on a layer with the desired color.

Why on Earth would I want the lines with the lighter color to appear on top of annotation leaders and feature lines of the rest of the drawing?!

If anyone knows how I can get feature lines of a component placed on a particular layer to appear below feature lines of components placed on a different layer, please please please share your wisdom.

I know I could make a view of just the components I want colored, convert the view to a sketch, place the sketch on the sheet format, and overlay a view without any of the colored components, but that's just not practical.

I've tried ordering the layers in the layer manager to see if that made a difference, but it did not.

Name another CAD package that doesn't let you control this. Sometimes I hate that I love SolidWorks so much.

edit: sample files attached.