Numeric Priorities in Org Mode

Org mode is configured "out-of-the-box" with these three levels of priority: A, B, C, where A is the highest priority. However, this can be changed. You can use numbers to indicate priority, such as 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest) as shown in the documentation.¹

If you specify priorities from 65 to 90, Org will interpret the numbers as ordinal values of ASCII character and give you "A" to "Z." If you try to be clever and specify priorities as 65 to 91 (91 is the decimal ASCII code for left square bracket) you'll be disappointed that when you lower the priority from "Z," you don't get "[." (I was disappointed, anyway.)

You can define priorities from 10 to 99, for example. But if you try to get to a priority higher than 10 using org-priority-up, Org will clear the priority cookie. However, you can manually enter a priority of 0 to ensure the item appears above all other items. (Please see Figure 1, below.) Thus, a priority value of 0 can be your "stat" item. It would be super neat if Org could understand that ASCII characters below 0 (such as exclamation mark) are an even higher priority than 0. Unfortunately, it doesn't even recognize [#!] as a priority cookie.

A large priority span seems like it would be useful. For example, you might have all utility bills set from 50 to 59, and shopping for birthday or anniversary gifts from 10 to 19. However, in order to go from a priority of 50 to 10, you'd have to press up arrow forty times. If you think you can invoke M-4 0 M-x org-priority-up to go quickly from 50 to 10, you'll be disappointed (again). The function org-priority-up doesn't accept a prefix argument.²

How do you use priority in Org?

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¹ Org Manual -- Priorities

² But you can record a macro that consists of a single S-<up> key press and then play it back with a prefix argument of 39.