> But, be that as it may, I'm curious as to how those "in the know" would
handle this problem in a more "icon-esque" fashion.
Not that I claim Olympian status or anything, but here is my 30-minute implementation of my understanding of your problem statement (a number of questions were left unspecified).
I did use a sentinel character '@' as a 27th letter, which could be criticized as not a fully ascii-clean solution, but then I also assumed only letters count, and that 'A' is equivalent to 'a', so there is no possibility of a collision in this case. You do get extra output including this "letter" and its neighbors.
The output style is my own invention. The center letter in parentheses. On its left are its left neighbors, and on the right are its right neighbors. I could sort by center letter, but I was getting tired and was ready for a beer.