Indeed it is politics, and common sense should indeed let the GNU compiler use GNU make.
My point is that espie@ seems to want to have his cake and eat it. If you refuse to work with upstream (for technical or political reasons) then don't be surprised if upstream forgets about you.
On the plus side, as he says he is happy to leave kettenis@ to deal with GCC, and he recently pushed a load of patches from OpenBSD to GCC, which were gladly accepted (although I did forget to apply one until reminded, but I'd hardly call that "a fight".)