I have an unreasonable and unquenchable hatred for developers who assume that their users have dark-background terminals. Honestly, the most insanely passionate contempt.
Drives me a bit nuts too, and I would disagree with some of the other things in this page as well (e.g. the preference for "human-readable" file sizes).
But there is a great joy in being able to release a new utility and say about it, "This is how it should work." It reflects your own desires, you understand it, you made the decisions that went into it and have actually thought about the alternatives. There's a delight there. It could be a sign of a piddling egotist, or of a developer who is excited about what real users get to see.
(I did this sort of thing once -- reimplementation of commonly-used, if more niche, thing + manifesto -- from more than 20 years ago: http://all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/)
My main hope for anyone doing this kind of thing is that not too many people actually use it. You don't want to get stuck supporting a tool like this for the world and its dog.
Nothing is more human readable than "123,456,789", so I think the problem is just the way you go about making them human readable. I couldn't agree more that lurching between B, kB, MB, and GB just because the file size changes it extremely jarring and disconcerting, and actually makes comparing the size much more difficult.
