I agree. ls is primarily a user-facing utility, and has acquired a ton of display and formatting switches. This is not a bad thing. Some of the display options

I agree. ls is primarily a user-facing utility, and has acquired a ton of display and formatting switches. This is not a bad thing. Some of the display options are superfluous but convenient. Others are awkward, very hard, or impossible to duplicate in a pipeline. New users don't need to be overwhelmed by the man page. -a and -l should be enough for >99% of use cases. ls shows up in shell scripts too, but that's almost always a mistake -- or a dependency on one of the harder-to-duplicate formatting options.