The buttons are effectively constantly moving out from under the mouse and this is no good.
In most situations, temporarily selecting a longer time window stabilizes the relative orders enough that the buttons can be clicked, but for items whose averages are identical over long periods of time even this can become tricky. Here I am trying to select the research items (challenge: hold your breath while I click 6 buttons):
As you can see, that's categorically ridiculous.
My only idea is this: When the mouse is over the item area, just completely freeze all the reordering. That's it. That way, when you put the mouse there they stop moving around, then you can go in for the kill. When you move the mouse out of the area, reordering resumes.
I think that's pretty straightforward. You could possibly tighten up the "freeze" zone by limiting it to the area immediately around the buttons instead the whole thing, although this would still leave an edge case if items were jumping between columns (since on the way from the left column to the right they'd have a chance to reorder again). But maybe that's OK.
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I like the larger option because it keeps things calm while you move the mouse between columns or use the scroll bar.
