Nice edit, Kellawgs! -- That's closer to the construction method of his reference image and was pretty much exactly what I was talking about in my first post in this thread.
It's worth noting to the OP that the two 'styles' of coloring are both valid (I have seen both in various retail games, and each has its own charm), but eliminating the outline like this has many practical benefits (which, too, is a stylistic choice for a sprite of this size, but in smaller sprites, it is generally a requirement). For one, removing the outline gives you A TON more room to work in your details and shift your forms around while keeping your silhouette having the same footprint across the canvas. The sprite looks bigger, but that's because it's taking advantage of all the unused space the outline took!
@ the OP:
As you can see in the edit, his forms are much easier to read -- the outline removal gives you one full shade more to work with in your forms, plus a ton of additonal pixels to use too! The difference is that these pixels were sparsely varied (reducing "noise" in the image, but again, a stylistic choice!) -- And as much as I love the "clusters" theory of pixels (usually credited to Helm), it was THIS style (the noisy one!) that tended to look the most "realistic" and "painterly" to people as it helped to show that 2D pixel art could look like a genuine (modern-day!) 3D rendered model when it wanted to! There's an appeal to that, and when you render a model at such a low resolution, you get a similar "noisy" look (trust me, I've done it lol) -- and of course, when doing this by hand, the result can be hundreds of thousands of times better than a simple render, so don't be afraid to accept that the "no outline, no noise" method is the only way -- it's just a different way -- with pros and cons -- and the biggest cons are the noise (sometimes leading to a lack of clarity and unintended artifacts) and the time it takes to render it by hand (which is generally a LOT in pixel art timescales!)
Another point about Kellawgs' edit is that if both were on a solid white BG, and you performed the squint test, you could tell his distant arm/leg are on a separate plane to his body due to the darkness of the colors he chose. Additionally, Kellawgs put the feet on a wide "table" rather than a thin "tightrope" as I mentioned in a previous post. The thighs are enlarged, the tail is lowered from the spine to behind his legs, and the claws are more pronounced. There's no real need to distinguish the claws from one another with various shades, but it's possible to do with one of the "green" shades if you really wanted to give the toe claws some 3D depth in the foreground. I'd leave the toe claws in the background leg of his edit alone though. The important thing about the claws being pointed down like that is that they "read" better as curved, dangerous, claws compared to your straight ones.
I hope that helps give a little more insight as to the hows and whys of the choices in Kellawgs' edit and reasons to potentially stick to your own style (or even a hybrid style) too!