I think you are correct in that the adaptive RED code never formally made it into SFQRED. SFQRED was a brief blip in time before codel showed up... I'd talked about it in that talk as a steppingstone in hybrid fq+aqm history. (prior to that we were working with qfq + red as entirely separate, modular qdiscs). So... oops.

I think the work was interesting and valuable, and if you want to play with the ARED variant probably all you have to do is OR in the TC_ADAPTATIVE value into the flags on the red setup in sch_sfq.c