Real wood or engineered. Pre-finished is a good way to go. Clear is a higher grade of hardwood that has less variation in color and more uniform with less knotholes, so not as rustic and busy looking and less of a statement. Character grade has lots of variation and knotholes. It depends on your taste. I tried to find pics of what I suggested and couldn't find the right combo, but this pic shows the lighter flooring used on the risers to tie it in. This shows an interesting riser treatment. The tile could include both wood colors. This shows darker stairs with a contrasting floor that contains the stair color and other lighter colors.

I like the newer floor you picked, but it doesn't work w/the stairs however, you could pick a similar wood tone, maybe lighter than the stairs, and that would still work. It should be in the same color family which is why the first one looks off. another option if you really want to go a bit diff, would be to put a runner on the stairs. you'd cover up most of the wood. Or, you could paint the treads. Or, if you really really want to change the color of the floors and the stairs are all that's holding you back, get new treads. not a big deal what kind of furniture do you have? what's the style of the home? what's going to last and work for the family?

I know the area well, flowers! You might want to investigate if there is any kind of azalea/camellia mix you can easily obtain to help acidify the alkaline clay where you'll plant ALmD. Oak leaf mold, peat, that kind of good stuff, things you'd use to plant blueberries, too. If that kind of material can be incorporated in the top few inches so it breaks down and flushes through the alkaline soil, it will help make multiflora happier. You can keep mulching with whatever acidic material available to maintain those conditions. You wouldn't need as much as if you were trying to grow camellias, but just enough to help mellow out the alkaline clay. This area is mainly sand. The whole valley is pretty much sand. After the quakes and all the damage, the State instituted engineered soil to mimic bed rock. When we added the patio cover, Santa Barbara County required 25" cube concrete footers on each post to secure the thing against the constant winds. I warned the installers about the engineered soil, but they still sent two, young men with pick axes and shovels. There are three posts, each with a 25" cube of concrete and those three holes took those two young men nearly EIGHT HOURS to manually dig. Literally. Oddly, water began collecting in the bottoms of the holes almost as quickly as they finished digging them, but roots don't penetrate into the soil. I used to deal with the Santa Clarita Urban Forest for street trees. They would purchase 24" boxed trees, excavate matching holes in the engineered soil and plug the holes with the root balls. Often, the trees are replaced after three or four years because the holes filled with water and the trees drowned. The soil is manually, physically compacted to be bed rock. Anything built in the state after about 1980 is on some sort of engineered soil, unless it was built on bed rock. The older builds which didn't suffer extreme damage were all due to being built on sold surfaces. The Encino house suffered nearly no damage because the ridge was stone and it was seated squarely on that stone. The newer things around it lost chimneys, walls, garages but not that old house. Other than being seismically stable, the other main advantage to not being able to dig holes is gophers HATE it. They are everywhere there is loose soil, but not in engineered areas. The city uses its parks as rainwater collection and percolation pools so more rainfall is recaptured than runs off into the ocean nine miles away. Those areas aren't engineered so the water absorbs quickly. The gophers LOVE them.

It seems like being in the same color family, they don't clash and won't look odd. I wouldn't replace them yet. If, after you finish the stairs and they look awful (which they won't) then you can do it. But I would wait and see how it looks. I don't think everything should be the same color. Then there's no contrast.