If you must keep vertex order, you must turn off all optimizations for mesh import.
And I will stand corrected if incorrect, but AFAIK, mesh optimization is kind of useless now, and adds very little performance anyway, kind of a holdover from days when polycounts mattered a whole lot more than they do now.
In my experience, I saw no loss from turning mesh optimization off, even on huge(256K +) meshes.
(Vertex order is important for my skinned mesh renderers, which are at lod0 about 50,000 verts).