Ordering homepage posts by date, but give customized ordering option in CP I'm looking to combine three different channels on the homepage, ordered by date, unless the client rearranges the hierarchy in the CP.

Low Reorder for EE had this customization, where entries would come into the plugin ordered by date, but you could drag and drop entries to the top if you wanted to rearrange the hierarchy.

Craft Structures is close, but 1) I need to combine three different channels into one hierarchy, and 2) these channels will grow immensely over time, so Structures will become cumbersome.

What are my options, if any? Is there a Low Reorder-type plugin out there?
For me this looks like a perfect fit for one structure with different entry types for each of your content types (text, video and recipes). Each entry type can have it's own set of fields, so there's no difference to individual channels (with one entry type each).

You can simply have the entry type's handle in your URIs, as the {type} tag is available in section URL settings (→ see help article), or you'd set up custom dynamic routes.

Via the entry's entry.type property you can include individual template partials for each entry type on your index page:

{% for entry in craft.entries.section('blog') %}
    &lt;li&gt;
        &lt;h2&gt;{{ entry.title }}&lt;/h2&gt;
        {% include '/blog/_partials/' ~ entry.type %}
    &lt;/li&gt;
{% endfor %}


Same for your _entry.html file:

{% include '/blog/' ~ entry.type %}


And I've heard that structures with many hundreds or thousands of entries is no problem for the control panel. I think it was Craft 2.0 that had many optimizations in that respect.