Can you change a story or text frame's index? (re autonumbering)

Does anyone know if there is a way to change the index of a text frame or story without changing the actual visual layout of an InDesign document? So far all I can come up with is to cut the frame and repaste it into the document. You can move a story within the index list of a document, but that visually cuts and pastes the story text.

actDoc.stories.item(1).move(LocationOptions.BEFORE, actDoc.stories.item(0));

I can't see any method to change the index of a text frame (other than cutting and repasting).

I want to put together some tests. I have a bunch of questions. Each question is a single story in a single text frame in an InDesign document. The text frame is linked to an InCopy document. The first paragraph of the question has a "QuestionNumber" style but the para style has no numbering. I want to have only one version of each question (the InCopy story) but to put the questions into different tests in different orders with different numbering. What I do is to create an InDesign template for the tests that has a QuestionNumber para style that includes autonumbering with the "Continue Numbers across Stories" option checked. This works beautifully and the questions are numbered in the order in which the text frames (and stories) are (via a script) copied from the question document and pasted into the test paper document. When the same question/story/textframe is used in two tests it is numbered in the order in which it is pasted into each test paper (but the original stays the same because it has no numbering).

The next step would be to be able to reorder the question numbers within the test paper (if you wanted to, say, swap questions 18 and 20). To do that you have to change the index of the story because the autonumbering across stories seems to depend on the index of the story.

What seems to happen is that stories are indexed in the order in which they are pasted into a document, but text frames are indexed in the opposite order. If you paste a text frame with one story into a new document, it is textframe.item(0) and story.item(0). If you then paste a second one into the document it is story.item(1) but textframe.item(0). The first text frame becomes textframe.item(1). When you cut a text frame and repaste it, it is reindexed as if you were pasting it for the first time.

The autonumbering also seems to be segregated by page. If you have questions 1 and 2 on page 1 and questions 3 and 4 on page 2, you can move around the text frames for 1 and 2 on the page but the numbering stays the same. Likewise for 3 and 4. If you drag 3 across to page 1 it stays as 3 but if you drag question 4 across to page 1 it becomes 3, and the original question 3 on page 2 becomes question 4. It is confusing but makes sense in a weird way once you get the hang of it.

Anyway, I have probably answered my own question and the best way to renumber the questions in a test is to run the script again and create a new document using a new question order.

But any other ideas are welcome.

Thanks.