Easy way to organize sublayers?

I have a layer with a list of all the countries in the world. I need to change the colors out sometimes and it would be very helpful if I were able to either search the sublayers by name or sort alphabetically. It seems like neither of those things can be done without a script. I also have tried to convert the sublayers to actual layers by dragging the layers above the current layer, but that did not work.

Is there an easy way to do what I'm trying to accomplish that I don't know about? Surely there is an easier way to manage sublayers.