BTW, the main reason for that is so a single top talkers table can be set up for the MIB and all users.
Else you might have one user on the console wanting the top 10 sorted one way, another user on a network port wanting the top 20 sorted another way, and a MIB user wanting the top 50 sorted some other way - so there'd be oodles of netflow data to store, over and above the netflow cache!
Setting the sort order and number of top flows to be shown means all queries can be satisfied out of a single results table - which is maintained for a short time to allow per-line MIB polling.