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Basically there's this hidden rating, the BABIP rating. I'm not an expert on it because it's somewhat confusing, but I'll try to explain it the best I can and I'm sure others will swing by to clarify it.
Three things factor into it; contact, power, and avoid Ks. CON raises it, while power and AvK lower it (this stands to reason. More CON means better quality of contact, more POW means less batted balls that stay in play, and more AvK means more balls in play which lowers the percentage that go for hits). So guys like your 23 SE Ruth with monster power and contact that is somewhat lower aren't going to cut it because their BABIP is not good.
On the other hand, AvK is still very useful (aside from the obvious appraisals like Tris Speaker where you observe that having a lot of everything makes for a good player). While it technically lowers BABIP, it also raises the floor on the player's batting average because they're putting bat to ball and getting hits more often aside from the times it goes flying over the fence.
As for your observations about batting order, that seems to me like a mixture of confirmation bias (i.e. random noise) and differing performance based on each manager's park factors/platoons.
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