Well, we remember some different things...

Branko Lankester built kmem ps that came earlier.

In the earliest procps version I found (0.7), I already tried to honor at least SysV arguments e and f for people whose fingers had been trained on SysV, but provided BSD-style output regardless. Your rewrite implemented multiple personalities, which was naturally much better.

It looks like I introduced sorting output in version 0.93 in April 1994, later than I recalled, but before I was aware of you doing work on procps. That version definitely sorts by default, and the "o" option toggles sorting. I also clearly failed to update the man page along with that new feature.

Your memory of the transition is different from mine. I was doing a poor job of being maintainer (slow to apply patches and do new releases) but I certainly didn't "revert" color support, though I suspect it was there in a patch or fork that I hadn't adopted. A fork was the obvious response to an unresponsive maintainer, so no complaints there! I did finally step back formally.