[throwaway31381]

I won't deny the useful additions GNU and BSD made to the barebones UNIX tools, but just by skimming the ls man page I can list some flags whose addition wasn't caused by the Unix Philosophy's limitation:

  -1 list one file per line
  -C list entries by columns
  -t sort by time, newest first; see --time
  -r, --reverse reverse order while sorting
  -S sort by file size, largest first
  --sort=WORD sort by WORD instead of name: none (-U), size (- 
  S), time (-t), version (-v), extension (-X), width