I want to be able to browse to a folder in Thunderbird, and, when I open it, view the email in that folder filtered by date order (newest at the top), by thread (oldest at the end of the chain), with threads expanded.

Using Thunderbird's View menu, I can do this per folder, but I could not find a way to set it by default.

Here is an approach which works, but it is a bit convoluted.