I've heard countless people claim doing a for each ordered loop for sorting is the best way. Most of these people don't use it in any complex or detailed settings. It is a nightmare if you ever use any objects other than just one type (ie, if you mixed tiled backgrounds with sprites--you can't mix object types in families). Like anywhere else, I'll recommend you stick with the z-sorter plugin (and use rex's updated one, too). You can choose how often you sort in a single event. Instead of every tick, use every few milliseconds or whatever and then call the "sort objects on layer" action. It really is the best way to go currently, and you can modify things easily now, too! If you need to manually move an object in front of another, you can with C2's relatively new z-ordering events. Just call that after the z-sorter plugin call and voila!
As far as shadowing goes, perhaps a second layer could be your solution? That's my solution to the same problem in Courier. It isn't perfect, requires a little more manual placement and fixes, and can cause the player to occasionally have a shadow over (or not over) them at the wrong moment, but it sure beats doubling your objects and running anything CPU-intensive.
In actuality, I have several layers that I use for my game, really, as a solution to most of your problems.
Overshadow -- shadows on objects over the player permanently
Over -- things like rooftops always over the player
Player/objects--my z-sorted layer. Really not a ton of stuff on it in many cases
Structure shadows--shadows on structures like buildings or cliffs
Structures--buildings and such
Regular shadows--shadows like you're doing now
Ground--duh
I make the objects never overlap between the shadow layers, and it covers the majority of instances that I would require. The only downside is not getting shadows on the player, but that's a small trade-off for the tons of fixes and flexibility I get. You could run a darken/tint shader on the player if they overlap a shadow and semi-fix that issue, but otherwise this fixes about everything in a simple, easy-on-the-CPU kind of way.
I get a little more mileage since my game's perspective is more of a 3/4 view straight-on instead of isometric, so I can get away with simpler shadows at times. Also, making the shadows blurrier makes them not stand out too much AND you can blend/fake things. I have a non-uniform blobby shadow that I've gotten a ton of use out of with just stretching and rotating it to be "close" to the shadow that object would cast.
Our games are set up differently, but this all should be worth looking into to see if it helps. Scroll through the few pages of my Courier thread to see a few more of my shadowing examples because my shadows don't overlap, and buildings cast shadows on themselves, too--which is more useful to me since I don't pre-draw any of them in an image editor, but rather build them out of parts and textures in C2.
Good luck!
Bonus pro-tip: You can import some shadows objects as a tiled background, but import it upside-down. Rotate it right-side up in the editor. Now, when you resize it, you crop instead of distorting. Now you can have multiple different partial shadows using the same object. Very useful in a some rather specific instances. Also, if you need the bottom of the shadow to be round or something instead of flat, use one of your multi-purpose shape or blob shadows to fix the bottom edge. Using a uniform opacity for the layer, no-one will ever know you combined two objects to make the shadow.