Default view for top should list programs sorted by CPU usage
At some point, top changed its default startup configuration:
commit 8ef6cd91fc5df6372a93bc4a37cbad34ead9654e
Author: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
Date: Sun Jun 29 00:00:00 2014 -0500
top: retire old stale startup defaults in favor of new
There are a few problems with the new defaults, but the biggest is that it makes the default top not useful for, what for me, is the biggest use case: finding out (in realtime) what the biggest CPU hogs on the system are. There are also some minor problems, such as in many terminal configurations, the new color scheme results in everything being displayed in a very ugly red. I also have a mild preference for no graphs, mostly because when I have a lot of CPU cores, the header now takes up a lot more space than I want.
Here's some more user complaints from Arch Linux, where the new top has been released https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1474872