I have about 21,000 headlines throughout my Org files, most of those tasks.
Nearly all of them have PROPERTIES drawers, and since those drawers appear at
the end of the entries, I've grown quite used to that arrangement. Anyway, it
didn't take much effort to adapt Org 9.x to allow for such positioning. This
patch is what I've been using, and it permits me to have the drawer either at
the beginning or the end.

What I haven't tested/modified yet is the code that drops items from the
cache, since that seems to also search for the properties re, yet I'm not sure
under what conditions that code is run...