I am using IBOutletCollections to group several Instances of similar UI Elements. In particular I group a number of UIButtons (which are similar to buzzers in a quiz game) a
Not sure when this changed exactly, but as of Xcode 4.2 at least, this no longer seems to be a problem. IBOutletCollections now preserve the order in which the views were added in Interface Builder.
UPDATE:
I made a test project to verify that this is the case: IBOutletCollectionTest