What causes the ordering constraint?

Classpath order of deps should be independent of alias order, unless you are providing the same top level dep at different versions, and you may then be able to solve this by using a different alias attribute like :override-deps

Ah yes! we had conflicting versions of nrepl. Thanks for the help

Sounds like there very seldom should be a case where alias ordering is needed? But for the record, the way to break out of Jack-in limitations like this is to use the command Calva: Copy Jack-in Command Line, start the repl from the terminal (editing the command line as necessary), and then connect Calva to the repl. I wonder if there is anything we can do in the Ux to make this easier to figure out. Jack-in gets to be a bit of trap in some situations...

yea, connecting to an externally started REPL got us around the problem. But still wanted to raise the issue in case there was something else we were missing, and turns out there was.